TaRRY EAGLETON

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,
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ideology
Ideolo
g
A Intoducton

TERRY EAGLETON
VERSO
London New York
Firt published by Vero 1991
Vero 1991
Alrght rsee
Vero
UK: 6 Mead Steet, Lndon WI V 3HR
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Verso i te imprnt of New Left Bok
Brth Libr Catlog i Publicaton Dat
Eagletn. Ter, 1943-
Ideology; an introducton.
I. Ideologes
I. Title
140
ISBN 0-86091-319-8
ISN 0-86091-538-7 pbk
US Libr ofCons Catlog-in-Publicaton Dat
Eagleton. Ter, 1943 -
Ideology: an introucton I Ter Eageton,
p. cm.
Includes bibliogrphical references a index,
ISBN 0-86091-319-8, -ISBN 0-86091-538-7 (pbk.)
1. Ideolog-Histor. I Title.
B823.3.E17 1991
140-dc20
Typset by Leapr & Gard Ltd, Great Britain
Printed and bound in Finland by Werer Soderstom Oy
r^1mdnkr
CON T E N T S
Introduction x
1
tlsIdeology?
2
Ideological Strategies 33
3
From the Enlightenment to the
Second Internatonal 63
4
From Lu
k
acs to Gramsci 93
5
From Adoro to Bourdieu 125
6
From Schopenhauer to Sorel 159
/
Discourse and Idelogy 193
Cncluion 221
Ak 225
Furher Reading - 233
Inde 235
Cnsider, B a fna exmple, the attude of contemprar Amercan
liberals the unending hoplessnes and miser of the lives of the
young blacks in American cities. Do we say cat these people must be
helped because they are our fellow human bings? We may, but it is
much more pruive, moraly W well W plitcally, to describe them
our fellow American - to insist that it is outrgeous that an Amercan
should live witout hope.
RCH RORT, Cntingenc, Irony, and Solidarit
On the uselessness of the notion of'ideology', see
Raymond Geus, The Idea oa Crtical Theor
RCH RORT, Contingenc, Irony, and Solidarit
IN TRO DUC TI O N
CONSIDE te following paradox. The last decade has wimessed a remark
able resurgence of ideological movements throughout the world. In the
Middle East, Islamc fundamentalism has emerged as a potent politcal force.
In the so-called Third World, and in one region of the British Isles, revolu
tonary nationalism contnues to join battle wth imperialist power. In some
of te post-capital
r
t states of the Easter bloc, a stll tenacious neo-Stlinism
remains locked in combat wt an array of oppositonal forces. The most
powerful capitalist nation in history has been swept from end to end by a
peculiarly noxious brand of Christan Evangelicalism. Thoughout this
period, Brtin has sufered the most ideologically aggressive and explicit
regime ofliving political memory, in a society whch taditionally prefers its
ruling values to remain implicit and oblique. Meanwhle, somewhere on te
left bank, it is anounced tat the concept of ideology is now obsolete.
How are we to account for this absurdity? Why is it that in a world
racked by ideological conflict, the very noton of ideology m evaported
witout trace from te writngs of postfodernism and post-stucturalism?1
The theoretical clue this conundrum is a topic that shall concern us in
ths book. Very briefy, I argue that three key doctrines of postmoderst
thought have conspired to discredit the classical concept of ideology. The
frst of these doctrnes turs on a rejection of the notion of representaton -
in fact, a rejection of a mcir|r|rt model of representaton. in whch the
Mrl
repreenttonal baby has been nonchalanty slung out with te empircist
bathwater. Te second revolves on an epistemological sceptcism which
would hold that the very act of identifing a form of consciousness as
ideologcal entails some untenable noton of absolute tt Since te latter
idea attact fe devotees these days, te former is tought to crumble in it
wae. We cannot brand Pol Pot a Stalinist bigot since dwould imply some
metaphysical certtde about what not being a Staliist bigot would involve.
The thrd doctrne concer a reformulaton of te relatons beteen
ratonalit, interest and power, along roughly neoNietschean lnes, whic
is tought to render te whole concept of ideolog redundant. Taken
togeter, these three theses have been thought by some enough to dispose of
d whole question of ideology, at exactly the hstorical moment when
Muslim demonstrators beat teir foreheads till the blood runs, and
American farmhands antcipate being swept immnently up into heaven,
Cadillac and all.
Hegel remark somewhere that all great historical events happen, so to
speak, twice. (He forgot to add: the frst tme as ttagedy, te second as farce.)
The current suppression of the concept of ideology u in one sense a
recyclig of the so-called 'end of ideolog' epoch whch followed te Second
World War; but whereas tat movement was at leat partally explicable as a
tumated response to the crimes of fascism and Stlinism. no such
plitcal ratonale underpins the present fashionable aversion to ideological
critque. Moreover, the 'end-of-ideology' school was palpably a creation of
te politcal rigt, whereas our own 'post-ideological' complacency often
enoug sports radical credentals. If the 'end-of-ideology' teorist viewed
ideolog as inherently closed, dogmatc and infexible, poscodernist
thought tends to see w ideology as teleological. 'totalitarian' and meta
physically grounded. Grossly tavested i mway, the concept of ideology
obediendY
,
tes itself of
The abonment of the noton of ideolog belongs wth a more
pervasive politcal falterig by whole sectons of the ersthle revolutonary
lef which i the face of a capitalism temporarily on the ofensive h beaten
a steady, shamefaced retreat from suc 'metaphysical' matters as clas
stggle and modes of producton, revolutonary agency and the nature of
te bourgeois stte. It is, admttedly, something of an embarassment for d
positon that, just at the moment when it w denouncing the concept of
revoluton as so much metaphysical claptrap, te thing itself broke out
where it had ben least expected, in the Stalinist bureaucracies of Eater
Introduction
Europe. No
d
oubt President Ceausescu spent his lat moments on eart
rminding hs executoners tat revoluton was an outmoded concept, tat
tere were ony ever micro-stategies and local deconscuctons, and that te
idea of a 'collectve revolutionary subject' was hopelessly passe. The aim of
d bok u in one sense suitably modest - to clarif something of te
tngled conceptual history of the noton of ideology. But it also ofers itself
a a politcal interention into tese broader issues, and so as a politcal
riposte to this latest teason of te clerk.
A poem by Tom Gunn speaks of a Grman conscript in the Second
World War who ris
k
ed h life helping Jes to escape te fate in store for
tem at te hands of the Nazs:
I know he had unusual eye,
Whose power no orders could determine,
Not to mistke the men he saw,
A others did, for gods or vermin.
What persuade men and women to mista
k
e each other from tme to tme
for gods or vermin is ideology. One qn undertand wl enough how
human beings may stuggle and murder for good material reasons - reasons
connected, for instance, wt ther physical survival. It i muc harder to
grasp how they may come to do so in te name of sometng as apparently
abstt a ideas. Yet ideas are what men and women lve by, and will
occasionally die for. If Gunn's conscript ecaped the ideological conditoning
of hs fellows, how did he come to do so? Did he act as he did in te name of
an altetve, more clement ideology, or just because he had a relistc view
of te nature of ts? Did hs unusual eyes apprecate men and women for
wht they were, or were hs perceptons in some sense a muc biased as
those of hs comrades, but in a way we happen to approve rater m
condemn? Was the soldier actng againt his own interests, or in the name of
some deeper interest
?
Lideology just a 'mista
k
e', or m it a more comp
l
ex.
elusive charcter?
Te study of ideology is among oter tings an inquiry into the ways in
whch people may come to invest in teir own unhappines. It is because
being oppressed sometmes brings wt it some slim bonuses tat we are
ocasionaly prepared to put up wit it. Te most efcient oppressor is the
one who persuades hs underlings to love, desire and ident with his power
and any practce of politcal emancipaton tus involve tat most difcult
Ieolo
g
of all form of liberaton. freeing ourselves from ourselve. Te oter side of
the story, however, is equally important. For if such domnion fils to yield
its victms sufcient gratfcation over an extended period of time, then it is
certain that they will fnally revolt against it. If it is rational to settle for an
ambiguous mture of misery and marginal pleasure when the political
alternatives appear perilous and obscure, it is equally rational to rebel when
the miseries clearly outweigh te gratfcations, and when it seems likely
that tere is more to be gained than to be lost by such action.
It is important to see that, in the critque of ideology, only those inter
ventons will work which make sense to te mystfed subject itsel In ts
sense, 'ideology critique' has a interesting afnity with te technique of
psychoanalyis. 'Critcism', in its Enightenment sense, consists in recountng
to someone what is awry with their situation, from an external, perhaps
'transcendental' vantage-point. 'Critique' is that form of discourse whch
seeks to inhabit the experience of the subject from inside, in order to elicit
those 'valid' features of that experience which point beyond the subject'S
present condition. 'Critcism' instructs currently innumerate men and
women that the acquisiton of mathematical knowledge is a excellent
cultural goal; 'critque' recognes that they will achieve such kowledge
quickly enough if their wage packets are at stake. The critque of ideology.
then, presumes that nobody is ever wholly mystifed - that those subject to
oppression experience even now hopes and desires whic could only be
realistcally fulled by a transformation of their materal conditons. If it
rejects the external standpoint of Enlightenment ratonality, it shares with
te Enligtenent ts fundamental tust in the moderately ratonal nature
of human beings. Someone who was entrely the victim of ideological
delusion would not even be able to recogne an emancipatory claim upon
them; and it is because people do not cease to desire, struggle and imagine,
even in te most apparently unpropitous of conditons. that the practice of
politcal emancipaton i a genuine possibility. This is not to claim that
oppressed individuals secretly harbour some full-blown alterative to their
unhappiness; but it is to claim that, once they have freed themselves from the
causes of that sufering, they must be able to look back, re-write their life
hstores and recognize that what they enjoy now is what they would have
previously desired, if ony they had been able to be aware of it. It is testi
mony to te fact that nobody is, ideologically speaking, a complete dupe that
people who are caracterized a inerior must actually lear to be so. It is not
enough for a woman or colonial subject to be defned as a lower form of life:
Introduction
they must be actvely taught ths defniton, and some of them prove to b
brliant graduates in ths process. It u astonishing how subde. resourceful
and quick-wited men and women can be in proving themselves to be
uncivilied and thickheaded. In one sense, of course, tis 'performatve
contradicton' is cause for politcal despondency; but in the approprate
circumstances it is a contradiction on whic a ruling order may come to
grief
Over the past ten years I have discussed the concept of ideology with Toril
Moi perhaps more regularly and intensively than any other intellectual
topic. and her thoughts on the subject are now so closely interoven with
mne that where her refections end and mine begin is, as they are fond of
saying these day, 'undecidable'. I am grateful to have had the beneft of her
keener. more analytic mind. I must also thank Norman Gera. who read te
book and gave me the beneft of his valuable judgement and I am grateful
to Ken Hirschop. who submitted the manuscript of te book to a typically
metculous reading and thus saved me from a number of lapses and lacunae.
I a also much indebted to Gargi Bhattacharyya, who generously spared
time from her own work to give me valuable assistance
,
with research.
TE
1
WHA T Is IDEOLOGY?
NOBODY myet come up with a single adequate defniton ofideology, and
m book will be no excepton. This is not because workers in te feld are
remarkable for teir low intelligence, but because the term 'ideology' has a
whole re of useful meanngs. not al of which are compatble with each
other. To m to compress ths wealth of meaning into a single comprehen
sive defmton would thus be unhelpful even uit were possible. The word
'ideology'. one might say, is a mr woven of a whole tssue of diferent
conceptual stds; it is tced trough by divergent histories. and it is
probably more important to assess what is valuable or can be discarded i
each of tee lineages dto mege them forcibly into some Grand Global
Theory.
To indicate this variety of meaning, let me list more or less at random
some defnitons of ideology currently in ciculation:
(a) te proces of producton of meanings, signs and values in social life;
(b) a. body of ideas characteristc of a partcular social group or class;
(t) ideas which help to legitmate a domnant political power
(d) flse ideas which help to legitmate a dominant politcal power
(e) systematcally distorted communication;
( tat which ofers a position for a subjecc
() forms of thought motvated by social interest;
l
Ideolog
(h) identity tnn
(i) socaly necessary illusion
u) te conjuncture of discourse and power;
(k) the medium in which conscious social actors make sene of their
world;
(I) acton-riented set of beliefs;
(m) the confusion of linguistc and phenomenal reality
(n) semiotc closure;
(0) the indispensable medium in which individuals live out their relations
to a social stucture;
(P) te process whereby social life is converted to a natural reality.!
There are several points to be noted about this list. First, not all of these
formulations are compatble with one another. If for example, ideolog
mean an
y
set of beliefs motvated by socal interests, then it cannot simply
signf the dominant forms of thought in a society. Others of these defnitions
may be mutually compatble, but with some interestng implications: if
ideology is both illusion and the medium in whch social actor make sense
of their world, then this tells us somethng rater depressing about our
routine modes of sense-makng. Secondly, we may note tat some of these
formulatons are pejoratve, oters ambiguously so, and some not pejoratve
at all. On several of these defntons, nobody would claim that their own
thining was ideological, just as nobody would habitually refer to them
selves as Fatso. Ideology, like halitosis, is in this sense what the other person
has. It is part of what we mean by claimng that human beings are somewhat
ratonal that we would be puzled to encounter someone who held convic
tions which they acknowledged to be illusory. Some of these defntions,
however, are neutral in this respect - 'a body of ideas characteristc of a
particular social group or class', for example - and to this extent one might
well term one's own vies ideological without any implicaton that they
were false or chmericaL
Trdly, we can note that some of these formulatons involve episte
mologcal questions - questions concered with our knowledge of the world
- whle oters are silent on tis score. Some of them ivolve a sense of not
seeing reality properly, whereas a defnition like 'action-oriented sets of
beliefs' leaves ths issue open. This distinction, as we shall see, is an
important bone of contention in the theory of ideology, and refects a
dissonance beteen two of the mainsteam traditons we fnd inscribed
Z
What I Ieolog?
withn the term. Roughy speakng, one central lineage, from Hegel and
Marx to Georg Lukacs and some later Marst thinkers, has been much
preoccupied with ideas of true and false cognition, with ideology as illusion,
distorton and mystfcation; whereas an alternative tadition of thought has
been les epistemological than sociological, concerned more with the
function of ideas withn social life d with their reality or unreality. The
Marist hertage has itself straddled these two intellectual currents, and that
both of tem have somethng interestng to tell us will be one of the con
tentions of this book.
Whenever one is pondering the meaning of some specialized term, it is
always useful to get a sense of how it would be used by the person-in-the
street, if it is used there at all. Ts is not to claim suc usage a some fnal
court of appea, a getre whic many would view as itself ideologica; but
consultng the person-in-the-steet nonetheless has its uses. What, then,
would be meant if somebody remarked in the course of a pub conversation:
'Oh, tat's just ideologica1!' Not, presumably, that what had just been said
wa simply false, tough tis might be implied; if that wa what was meant,
why not just say so? It is aso unlikely that people in a pub would mean
something like 'That's a fine specimen of semiotc closure!' or hotly accuse
one another of confusing linguistic and phenomenal reality. To claim in
ordinary conversation that someone is speaking ideologically is surely to
hold mat they are judging a particular issue through some rigid framework
of preconceived ideas which distorts their understanding. I view things a
they really are; you squint at them though a tunnel vision imposed by some
extraneous system of doctrine. There is usually a suggestion that this
involves an oversimplifing view of the world - that to speak or judge
'ideologically' is to do so schematically, stereo typically, and perhaps with the
faintest hint of fanaticism. The opposite of ideology here, then, would be less
'absolute truth' d'empirical' or 'pragmatic'. Ths view, the person-in-the
steet might be gratifed to hear, has the august support of the sociologist
Emile Durkheim, who characterized the 'ideological method' as consisting
in 'the use of notions to govern te collation of facts rather than deriving
notons from them.'2
It is surely not hard to show what is wrong with such a case. Most people
would not concede that without preconceptions of some kind - what the
philosopher Martn Heidegger calls 'pre-understandings' - we would not
even be able to identif an issue or sitation, let alone pass judgement upon
it. There is no such thing as presuppositionless thought, and to this extent all
3
Ideolog
of our tinking mght be said to be ideologcal. Perhaps r
g
id preconceptons
makes the diference: I presume tat Paul McCartey has eaten in te last
mcmonth, whic is not partculaly ideological, wherea you presuppose
tt he is one of te fort tousand elect who will be saved on te Day of
Judgement. But one persons rigidity i, notorously, anoter's open
mndedness. His thought is red-neck, your i dotl, and mine is
delciously supple. There ae certinly fonn of tought whic simply 'read
of' a partcular sitaton from certain pre-stblshed general principles,
and te stle of thinkig we call 'rtonalist' h in generl been guilty of tis
eror. But it remains to be seen wheter all tat we call ideologcal is i t
sense ratonalistc.
Some of te most vociferous persons-in-te-street are known as
Aerican sociologists. Te belef that ideology is a schematc, infexible way
of seeing te world, as against some more modest, piecemeal, pragmatc
wisdom, was elevated in te post-war period fom a piece of popular
wisdom to an elaborate sociolocal teory.3 For te Amercan poltcal
theorist Edward Shis, ideologe are explicit dosed, resistnt to inovaton
promulgated wit a great deal of afectvity and require totl adheence
from teir devotees: Wt tis comes down to is that te Soviet Unon uin
the grip of ideology while te United States sees things as tey really are.
, a the reade w appreciate, i not in itself an ideologcal viewpoint.
To seek some humble, pragmatc politcal goal, such as brnging down te
demoatcaly elected goverent of Chile, is a queston of adaptng
onesel reastcaly to te fact to send one's uinto Czechoslovakia is an
instance of ideological fanatcism.
A interestng featre of tis 'end-of-ideology' ideology is tat it tends to
view ideology in to quite contradictory ways, as at once blndly iratonal
and excessively ratonalistc. On te one hand, ideologies are passionate,
rhetor impelled by some bnigted pseudo-religious fait whch te
sober tecnocratc world of modem capitalism mtully outgrow on
te oter hand tey are arid conceptal sytem whic seek to reconstruct
soiety from te ground up in accordance wit some bloodless blueprint
Av Guldner srdonically encapsulates tese ambivalences, ideology i
'te mind-infaming realm of the doctrinaire, te dogmatc, te im
passioned, the dehumanising, the false, te irratonal, and, of course, te
"extremist" conscousness'.s From te stndpoint of an empircist social
enneerng, ideologie have at once to much heart and too little, and so
c be condemned in te same breat as lurid fantasy and staigacketng
1
Wt LIeolog?
doa. Te atct, in oter words, te ambiguous respone tradiQonally
accorded to intellectuals, who ae scored for teir visionary dreamng at
te very moment they are being censured for teir clical remoteness from
common afectons. It is a choice irony tt in seekig to replace an i
pasioned fanatcism wth an austerely technocratc approach to social
prblems, te end-of-ideology theorists unwttngly re-nact the gesture of
tose who invented the term 'ideology' in te frst place, the ideologues of
the French Enlightenent.
A objecton to te cse tt ideolo consist i peculiarly rigd set of
ideas is tat not every rgd set of ideas is ideological. I may have unusually
infexible beliefs about how to brush my teeth, submittng each individual
tooth to an eact number of strokes and favouring mauve toothbrushes only,
but it would seem strnge in most circumstances to call such views ideological .
. ('Pathological' mght be rather more accurate.) It is tue tat people some
tmes use the word ideoloy to refer to systemtc belief in general, as when
someone says that they abstain from eatng meat 'for practical rather than
ideological reasons'. 'Ideology' here is more or less synonymous wth the
broad sense of the term 'philosophy', as in the phrase 'The President has no
,
philosophy', which was spoken approvingly about Richard Nion by one of
hs aides. But ideology is surely often felt to entail more thanjust tis. If! a
obsessional about brushing my teeth because i the Brtsh do not keep in
god health ten the Soviet w wak al over our fabby, toothless nation,
or if I make a fetsh of physical health because I belong to a society whic
can exert technological dominion over just about eeryting but death, then
it mght make more sense to describe my behaviour as ideologclly
motvated. T he ter ideology, in oter words, would seem to make reference
not only to belief systems, but to questons of power
Wat kind of reference, though? Perhaps te most common answer is to
claim that ideology has to do with legitimating the power of a dominant
soial group or class. 'To stdy ideoloy', wtes John B. Tompson. ' ... is to
study the ways in which me (or signifcaton) serves to sustain relatons
of domton.' This is probably the single most wdely accepted defniton
of ideolog; and the process of legitmation would seem to involve at least
six diferent strategies. A domnant power may legitmate itself by promoting
blef and values conenial to it naturaliing and univeraljjng such belief so
as to render tem self-vident and apparently inevitable; denirating ideas
which mght challenge it; ecluding rival forms of tought perhaps by some
unspoken but systematc logic; and obscurng social reality i ways convenent
5
Ideolog
to itsel Such 'mystfcaton', as it is commonly known, fequently takes the
form of masking or suppressing social conficts, from which arises the
concepton of ideology as an imaginary reolution of real contradictions. In
any actual ideological formation, all si of these statee are lkely to
interact in complex ways.
There are, however, at least two major difculties with this otherise
persuasive definition of ideology. For one thng, not every body of belief
whch people commonly term ideological is associated with dominant
politcal power. The political left, in particular, tends almost intnctvely to
thnk of such dominant mode when it considers the topic of ideology; but
what then do we call the beliefs of the Levellers, Diggers, Narodniks and
Sufragettes, which were certainly not the governing value systems of their
day? Are socialism and feminism ideologies, and if not why not? Ae they
non-ideological when in political opposition but ideological when they
come to power? If what the Diggers and Sufragette belieed is 'ideological',
as a good deal of common usage would suggest. then by no means all
ideologes are oppressive and spuriously legitimatng. Indeed the right-wing
political theorist Kenneth Minogue holds, astoundingly, that al ideologie
are politically oppositional, sterile totalizing schemes as opposed to the
ruling practcal wisdom: 'Ideologies can be specifed in terms of a shared
hostity to modernity: to liberalism in politcs, individualism in moral
practice, and te market in economics.'7 On this view, supporters of
socialism are ideological whereas defenders of capitalism are not. The extent
to which one is prepared to use the term ideology of one's own political
views is a reliable index of the natre of one's politcal ideology. Generally
speaking, conservatves like Minogue are nerous of the concept in their
own case, since to dub their own belief ideological would be to risk turng
them into objects of contestation.
Does tis mean, then, that socialist, feminst and other radicals should
come clean about the ideological nature of their own values? If the term
ideology is confned to dominant forms of social thought, such a move would
be inaccurate and needlessly confusing; but it may be felt that there uneed
here for a broader defnition of ideology, as any kind of intersection between
belief systems and political power. And such a defnition would be neutral
on the question of whether this intersecton challenged or confrmed a
partcular social order. The political philosopher Martn Seliger argues for
just such a formulation, defning ideology as 'sets of ideas by which men [sic]
posit eplain and justif ends and means of organsed social acton, and
6
Wt LIeolog?
specifcally political acton, irrespective of wheter suc acton as to
preserve, amend, uproot or rebuild a given social order'.8 On this forma" tion,
it would make perfect sense to speak of'socialist ideology'. as it would not (at
least in the West) if ideology meant just ruling belief systems, and a it would
not, at least for a socialist, if ideolog referred inescapably to illusion,
mystfcaton and false consciousness.
To widen the scope of the term ideology in tis style has madvantage of
staying faitul to much common usage. and tus of reolving te apparent
dilemma of why. say. fascism should be an ideology but feminism should not
be. It carries, however, the disadvantage of appearing to jettson from the
concept of ideolog a number of elements which many radical theorsts have
asumed to be centrl to it the obscurng and 'naturalizing' of social reality,
the specious resolution of real contadictions, and so on. My own view is
that both the wider and narrower sense of ideology have their use, and that
their mutual incompatibility, descending as they do from divergent politcal
and conceptual histories, must be simply acknowledged. This view mthe
advantage of remaining loyal to te implicit slogan ofBerolt Brect - 'Use
what you can!' - and the disadvantage of excessive charity.
Suc charity is a fault because it risks broadening the concept of ideology
to the point where it becomes politcally toothles; and this i te second
problem with the 'ideolog as legitmation' thesis, one which concers the
nature of power itself On the view of Michel Foucault and his acolytes,
power is not someting confned to armies and parliament: it is, rater, a
perasive, intangible netork of force whch weaves itself into our slightet
gestures and most intimate utterances.9 On tis theory, to limit the idea of
power to its more obvious political manifestatons would itelf be an
ideological move, obscurng the complex diffuseness of its operatons. That
we should tink of power as imprintng our personal relatons and routne
activities is a clear political gain, as feminist, for instance, have not been
slow t recogne; but it caries with it a problem for te meaning of
ideology. For if there are no values and beliefs not bound up wt power,
then te term ideology threatens to expand to vanishing point. Any word
whch covers everything loses its cutting edge and dwindles to an empty
sound. For a term to have meaning. it must be possible to specif what, in
particular circumstances, would count as the oter of it - whch dosn't
necessarily mean specifing somethng which would be alwa
y
and eerwhere
te oter of it. If power, like te Amghty himself is omnipresent. then te
word ideolog ceaes to single out anything in partcular and becomes
7
Ideolog
wholly uninormatve -just a uany piece of human behaviour whatsoever,
including torure, could count as an instance of compassion. the word
compassion shrinks to an empty signifer.
Fat to ts logic, Fucault and his followers effectvely abandon the
concept of ideology altogeter, replacing it wit te more capacious
'discourse'. But ths may be to relinquish too quickly a useful distncton.
The force of te term ideology lies in its capacity to discriminate beteen
tose power stugles which ae somehow cental to a whole form of social
lie, ad tose whch are not. A breakfast-tme quarrel between husband and
wife over whq eactly allowed the toast to tum that grotesque shade of blac
need not be ideological; it become so when. for eample, it bes to engage
queston of sexual power, belefs about gender roles and so on. To say that
this sort of contenton is ideological makes a diference, tells us something
inforatve, as the more 'expansionstc' senses of the word do not. 'ose
radicals who hold that 'everyting is ideological' or 'everythng is poltcal'
seem not to realize tat tey are in danger of cuttng the ground from
beneat their own feet. Such slogan may valuably challenge an excessively
narrow defton of politcs and ideology, one convenent for a rulng
power intent on depoltcizng whole sectors of social life. But to stetch
tese terms to the point where they become coextensive with everyting is
simply to empty them of force, whic is equally congenial to the rling
order. It is perfectly possible to agree with Nietsche and Foucault tat
power is everwhere, whle wantng for certain practcal purposes to distn
guish between more and less cental instances of it.
Tere are tose on te poltcal left, however, who feel uneasy about this
whole business of decidig between te more and less central. Isn't d
merely a surrepttous attempt to margnalize certain power stuggles which
have been unduly neglected? Do we really want to draw up a herarchy of
such conicts, thus reproducing a typically conseratve habit of thought? If
someone actually believes that a squabble between two chldren over a ball is
as important as te El Salvador liberaton movement, then you simply have
to ask tem whether they are jokng. Perhaps by dint of sufcient rdicule
you mht persuade tem to become properly hierarchcal thkers. Politcal
radicals are quite a dedicated to the concept of prvilege as teir opponents:
tey believe, for example, tat the level of food supplies in Mozambique is a
weighter issue than the love life of Mickey Mouse. To Uthat one kid of
confCt is more important tan anoter involves, of course, aruing for this
priorty and being open to disproval; but nobody actually beleve tat
8
Wht LIeolog?
'power is everhere' in te sense tat any manifestaton of it is a si
cant as any oter. On this issue, as perhaps on all oters, nobody is in fact a
relatvist. whatever they may rhetorically assert.
Not everthig, then, may usefully b said to be ideological. there u
notg which is not ideological, ten the term cancels all te way trough
and drops out of sigt. To say ths dos not commt one to believing that
there is a knd of discourse whic is inherently non-ideological; it just means
that i any partcular sitaton you must be able to poit to what counts as
non-ideological for the term to have meanng. Equally, however, one might
clam tat tere is no piece of discourse whch could not be ideological, given
the appropriate conditons. 'Have you put the cat out yet?' could be an
ideological utterance, if (for example) it carried the unspoken implicaton:
'Or are you ben your usual shiftles proletarian self?' Conversely, te state
ment 'men are superor to women' need not be ideologcal (in te sense of
supportng a dominant power); delivered in a suitbly sardonic tone, it
mght be a way of subvertng sexist ideology.
A way of puttng this point is to suggest that ideology is a matter of
'discourse' rather than 'language'.10 It concerns the actual uses of language
beteen particular human subjets for te production of specifc efects.
You could not decide whether a statement was ideological or not by
inspecting it in isolaton from it discursive context, any more than you
could decide in this way whether a piece of writng was a work of literar
art. Ideology is less a matter of te inherent linguistic propertes of a
pronouncement than a queston of who is saying what to whom for what
puroses. Ts isn't to deny tat there are partcular ideologcal 'idioms': the
language of fascism for eple. Fascism tends to have its own peculiar
lexicon (Lebenraum sacrifce, blood and soil), but what is primarily ideo
logcal about these terms i the power-interests they serve and the political
efect they generate. Te general point. then, is tat exacty the same piece
of language may be ideological in one context and not in another; ideology
is a functon of the relaton of an utterance to its social contet
Similar problems to those of the 'pan-powerist' case arise if we defne
ideology as any discourse bound up with specifc social interests. Fr, once
again, what discourse isn't? Many people outside right-wing academia
would nowadays suspect te notion of some wholly disinterested language;
and u tey are right then it would seem pointless to defne ideology as
'socially interested' utterances, since this covers absolutely anything. (he
very word 'interest', incidentally, is of ideological interest as Raymond
9
Ideolog
Williams points out in Keords. it is signifcant that 'our most general word
for attacton or involvement should have developed from a formal objectve
term in propert and fnance ... this now central word for attraction. atten
ton and concern is saturated with the experience of a societ based on
money relatonships',II) Perhaps we could m to distnguish here beteen
'social' and purely 'individual' kinds of interest. so that the word ideology
would denote te interests of specifc social groups rather than, say,
someone's insatable hanering for haddock But the dividing line between
social and individual is notoriously problematc. and 'social interets' u in
any case so broad a category as to risk emptying the concept of ideology
once more of meaning.
It may be useful. even so. to discrimiate beteen to 'levels' of interet,
one of which might be said to be ideological and the other not. Human
beings have certain 'deep' interests generated by the nature of their bodies:
interests in eating. communicating with one another, understanding and
controlling their environment and so on. There seems no very useful sense
in which these kinds of interet can be dubbed ideological, as opposed. for
example, having an interest in bringing down the goverment or laying
on more childcare. Postmodernist thought, under the influenee of Friedrich
Nietsche, has tpically confated these different sorts of interests in an illicit
way, fashioning a homogeneous universe in which everything from tyin
one's shoelaces to toppling dictatorships is levelled to a matter of 'interests'.
The politcal effect of this move is to blur the specifcit of certain forms of
soial confict, grossly iating the whole category of , interests' to the point
where it picks out nothing in particular. To describe ideology as 'interested'
discourse. then, calls for the same qualifcaton as characterizing it as a
question of power. In both cases, the term is forceful and informative only if
it helps us to distnguish between those interests and power conficts which
at any given time are fairly central to a whole social order. and those which
are not.
None of the argument so far cast much light on the epistemological issues
involved in the theory of ideology - on the question, for example, of
whether ideology can be usefully viewed as 'false consciousness'. This u a
fairly unpopular notion of ideology nowadays, for a number of reasons. For
one thing, epistemology itself is at the moment somewhat out of fashion,
and the assumption that some of our ideas 'match' or 'correspond to' the way
things are, while others do not, is felt by some to be a naive, discreditble
l0
What I Ieolog?
theory of knowledge. Fr another tng, the idea of false consciousness can
be taken as implying the possibility of some unequivocally correct way of
viewing the world, which is today under deep suspicion Moreover, the
belief that a minority of theorists monopolie a scietifcally grounded
knowledge of how society is, whle the rest of us blunder around in some fog
of false consciousness, does not partcularly endear itself to the democratc
sensibility. A novel version of this elitsm has arisen in te work of the
philosopher Rcard Rorty, in whose ideal society the intellectuals will be
'ironst', practsing a suitably cavalier, laid-back atttude to their own
beliefs, while the masses, for whom such self-ironing might prove too
subversive a weapon, wil contnue to salute the fag and take lie serouslyP
In this sitation, it seems simpler t some theorists of ideology to drop
the epistemological issue altogether, favouring instead a more poltcal or
sociological sense of ideology as the medium in which men and women
fght out teir social and political batles at the level of signs, mearungs and
representations. Even as orthodox a Marxist a Alex Callinicos urges us to
scrap the epistemological elements in Marx's own theor ofideology,J3 whle
Gran Therbor is equally emphatic that ideas of flse and true conscious"
ness should be rejected 'explicidy and decisively, once and for all'.l Martin
Selige wants to discard this negatve or pejoratve meaning of ideology
altogeter, whie Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, writng in a perod when
the 'false consciousness' thesis was at the height of its unpopularity,
peremptorily dismiss the idea as 'ludicrous'.'6
To argue for a 'politcal' rather tan 'epistemological' defniton of
ideology u not of course to claim tat politcs and ideology are identcal.
One way one mght think of distinguishing them is t suggest that politics
refers to the power processes by which social orders are sustained or
challenged, whereas ideology denotes the ways in which these power
processes get caught up in the realm of signifcaton. Tis won't quite do,
however, since politics h its own sort of signifcation, which need not
necessarily be ideologicaL To state that there is a consttutional monarchy in
Britn is a politcal pronouncement it becomes ideological only when it
begins to involve beliefs - when, for example, it carries te implict rider
'and a good thng too'. Since this usually ony needs to be said when there are
people around who consider it a bad thng, we can suggest that ideology
concerns less signfcaton tan conicts within te feld of signifcaton. If
the members of a dissident politcal group say to each other, 'We can bring
down the government', this is a piece of political discourse; if tey say it to
ll
Ieolog
te goverent it becomes istntly ideological (i the expanded sense of
the term), sice the utterance m now entered into te arena of discursive
stggle.
Tere are several reasons why te 'false conciousness' view of ideolog
seems unconvincing. One of them h to do with what we might call te
moderte rtionality of human beings i general. and i perhaps more the
expresion of a politcal faith than a conclusive argument. Astotle held that
there was an element of trth in most beliefs; and tough we have witnessed
enough patological irratonalism i the politcs of our ow century to be
nerous of any too sanguine trst i some robust human rtionalty, it is
surely hard to credit tat whole masses of human beings would hold over
some etensive historical period ideas and beliefs which were simply
nonenical. Deeply persistent belef have to be supported to some' extent
however meagrely, by the world our prctcal actvity discose to us; and to
believe that immene numbers of people would live and sometme die i
the name of ideas which were absolutely vacuous and absurd is to take up an
unpleasantly demeanng atttude towards ordinary men and women. It i a
typically conseratve estmate of human beings to see them a sunk in
irratonal prejudice, icapable of reasonng coherently; and it is a more
radical atttude to hold that while we may indeed be aficted by all sorts of
mystfcatons, some of which might even be endemic to the mnd itelf we
nevereless have some capacity for making sense of our world in a
modertely cogent way. If human beings really were gullible and benghted
enough to place their faith in great numbers in ideas which were utterly void
of meaning, then we might reasonably ak whether such people were worth
politcaly supportng at al. If they are that credulous, how could they ever
hope to emancipate themselves?
It follows fom dview tat uwe come across a body of sy, mgcal or
mytological or religious doctine to which many people have committed
themselves. we can often be reaonably sure that there is sometng in it
What that somethg is may not be, for sure. what the exponents of such
creeds believe it to be; but it i unlikely to be a mere nonsense either. Simply
on account of the perasivenes and durability of such doctrines. we can
generally assume that they encode, in however mystifed a way, genuine
needs anp desire. It is false to believe tat the sun moves round the e
but it is not absurd; and neiter is it absurd to hold that justce demands
sending electric curents through te bodies of murderers. There is nothng
ridiculous i claiming that some people are inferior to oters, since it is
IZ
Wht LIdeolog?
obviously tue. In certin defnite respects. some individuals are indeed
inferior to others: less good-tempered, more prone to envy, slower in the
ffty-yard dash. It may be false and pernicious to generalize these particular
inequaltes to whole races or classes of people, but we can understand well
enough the logic by which ts comes about. It may be wrong to believe that
the human race is in such a mess that it can be saved only by some
transcendental power, but the feelings of impotence, guilt and utopian
aspiaton whch such a dogma encapsulates are by no means illusory.
A further point can be made here. However widespread 'false conscious
ness' may be in social life, it can nevertheless be claimed that most of what
people say most of the time about the world must in fact be true. This, for
the philosopher Donald Davidson, is a logical rather d an empircal
point. For unless. so Davidson argues, we are able to assume that most
people's obserations are most of te tme accurate, there would be an
inuperable diffcult in ever gettng to understand tei language. And te
fact is that we do seem to be able to translate the languages of other cultures.
A one of Davidson's commentators formulates tis so-called principle of
carty: 'If we tn we understand what people say, we must also regard
most of our obseratons about te world we live in as correct.'17 Many of the
utterances in queston are of a fairly tivial sort, and we should not under
estmate the power of common illusion: a recent opinon poll revealed tat
one in three Britons beleves that the sun moves round the earc and one in
seven holds tt the solar system is larger than the universe. A far a our
routne social life goes, however, we just could not in Davidson's view be
mistaken most of the tme. Our practical knowledge must be mostly
accurate, since otherwise our world would fall apart. Whether or not the
solar system is bigger m the universe plays little part in our daily social
activites, and so is a point on which we can afford to be mistaken. At a fairly
low level, individuals who share the same social practces must most of the
tme understand one another correctly, even if a small minority of them in
unversities spend their tme agonzing over the indeterminacy of discourse.
Those who quite properly emphasie that language u a terrain of confict
sometmes forget that confict presupposes a degree of mutual agreement
we are not poltcally confictin
g
if you hold that patiarchy is an objecton
able social system and I hold tat it is a small town in upper New York state.
A certain practcal solidarity is built into the structures of any shared
language, however much that language may be traversed by the divisions of
class, gender and race. Rdicals who regard such a view as dangerously
13
Ideolog
sanguine, expressive of too naive a faith in 'ordinary language'. forget that
such practical solidarity and reliability of cognition are testimony to that
basic realism and intelligence of popular life which is so unpalatable to the
elitst.
What Davidson may be accused of overlookng, however. is that form of
'systematically distorted communication' whch for Jurgen Habermas goes
by the name of ideology. Davidson argues that when native speakers
repeatedly point at a rabbit and utter a sound, this act of denotation must for
most of the time be accurate, otherwise we could never come to learn the
natve word for rabbit, or - by extension - anything else i thei language.
Imagine. however, a society which uses the word 'duty' every time a man
beats his wife. Or imagine an outside observer in our own culture who,
having picked up our linguistc habit, was asked by his fellows on returng
home for our word for dominaton, and replied 'service'. Davidson's theory
fails to take account of these sstematic deviations - though it does perhaps
establish that in order to be able to decipher an ideological system of
discourse, we must already be in possession of the normative, undistorted
uses of terms. The wife-beating society must use the word 'duty' a sufcient
number of times in an appropriate context for us to be able to spot an
ideological 'abuse'.
Even if it is true that most of the ideas by which people have lived are not
simply nonsensical. it is not clear that ths charitable stance is quite enough
to dispose of the 'false consciousness' thesis. For those who hold that thesis
do not need to deny that certain kinds of illusion can express real needs and
desires. All tey may be claiming is that it is false to believe that murderers
should be executed, or that the Achangel Gabriel is preparing to put in an
appearance next Tuesday, and that these falsehoods are signifcantly bound
up with te reproduction of a dominant politcal power. There need be no
implication that people do not regard themselves as having good grounds
for holding these beliefs; the point may simply be that what they believe u
manifestly not the case, and that this is a matter of relevance to political
power.
Part of the opposition to the 'false consciousness' case stems fom the
accurate claim that, in order to be truly effectve, ideologes must make at
least some minimal sense of people's experience, must conform to some
degree with what they know of social reality from their practcal interacton
with it A Jon Elster reminds us, rling ideologies can actvely shape the
want and desires of those subjected to them;18 but they must also engage
14
What I Ideolog?
signfcantly with the want and desires that people aleady have, catchi
up genuine hope and needs, reinfectng tem in their own peculiar idiom,
and feeding them back to teir subjects in ways whic render these ideo
logies
plausible and attractve. Tey must be 'real' enough to provide te
basis on whic individuals can fashion a coherent identty, must frsh
some solid motivations for efectve action, and must make at least some
feeble attempt to explain away their own more fagrant contadictons and
incoherencies. In short, successful ideologies must be more tan imposed
illusi
ons, and for all their inconsistencies must communicate to their
subjects a version of social reality which is real and recognizable enough not
to be simply reected out of hand. They may. for example, be te enough in
what they assert but false in what they deny, as John Start Mill considered
almost all social theories to be. Any ruling ideology which faled altogether
to mesh with its subjects' lived experience would be extremely vulnerable,
and its exponents would be well advised to trade it in for anoter. But none
of ths contradicts the fact that ideologies quite often contain important
propositions whch are absolutely false: that Jews are inferior beings, that
women are less ratonal than men, that forcators will b condemned to
perpetal torment.19 If these views ae not intances of false consciousnes,
then it is difcult to know what is; and those who dismss te whole noton
of false consciousness must b careful not to appear cavalier about the
ofensiveness of these opinions. If te 'false consciousness' case commts one
to the view tat ideology u simply unreal, a fantsy entrely disconected
from social reality, then it is difcult to know who. these days at least,
actually subscribes to such a standpoint. If on the oter hand. it does no
more tan assert tat there are some quite central ideological utterances
which are manifestly false. then it is equally hard to see how anybody could
deny ths. The real question. perhaps, is not wheter one denies d, but
what role one ascribes to suc falsehood in one's teor of ideology a a
whole. Are false representton of social realty somehow consttutve of
ideology, or more contingent to it?
One reason why ideology would not seem to be a matter of false
consciousness is tat many statements whic people might agree to be
ideologcal are obviously true. 'Prince Charles is a thoughtful, conscientous
fellow, not hideously ugly' s true, but most people who thought it worth
saying would no doubt be using the statement in some way to buttress the
power of royalty. 'Prince Andrew is more intelligent tan a hamster' is also
probably true, if somewhat more controversial; but the efect of such a
l>
Ideolog
pronouncement (i one ignore the irony) is again likely to be ideologcal i
the sense of helping to legitimate a dominnt power. Ts, however, may not
be enough to answer those who hold that ideology is in general falsifing.
Fr it c always be argued that whe such utteances are empircal
y
tre,
they are flse in some deeper, more fundamental way. It is te that Prince
Charles is reasonably concientous, but it is not tre that royalty is a desir
able intitton. Imagine a management spokesperson announcing that 'If
tis strike contnues, people wll be dying in the steets for lack of
ambulances. This mght well b te a opposed to a claim that they wb
dyin of boredom for lack of newspapers; but a stiking worker might
nevertheless see the spokesperson as a twister, since the frce of the observa
ton is probably 'Gt bac to work', and there is no reason to assume that
ts, under the Crcumstances, would be the most reasonable ting to do. To
say that the statement i ideological is then to claim that it i powered by a
ulterior motive bound up with the legitimaton of certain interest in a
power stggle. We mgt say tat the spokesperson's comment is te as a
piece of language, but not as a piece of discourse. It descrbes a possible
sitaton accurately enough; but as a rhetorical act aimed at producing
certain effects it is false, and this in to senses. It is false because it involves a
kid of decepton - the spokeperson is not really saying what he or she
means; and it carries with it an implication - that getng bac to work
would be the most contrctve acton to take - which may well not b the
case.
Other types of ideological enunciaton are tue in what they afrm but
false i what they exclude. 's land of liberty', spoken by an Amercan
politcian, may be tre enough if one has in mind the freedom to practise
one's rligion or tr a fast buck, but not if one considers the freedom to live
witout the fear of being mugged or to announce on prime-tme television
tat the president is a murderer. Other knds of ideological statement
involve falsity without either necessarily intending to deceive or being
sigcantly exclusive: 'I'm Britsh and proud of it', for example. Both parts
of this obseraton may be tue, but it implies that being Britsh is a virtue in
itself which is false. Note that what is involved here is less deception tan
self-decepton, or delusion. A comment like 'If we allow Pakstans to live in
our steet, the house prices wfall' may well be te, but it may involve the
assumpton that Pakstans are inerior beings, which is false.
It would seem, then, that some at least of what we call ideological
discourse is true at one level but not at another: te in it empirical content
16
Wht LIdeolog?
but deceptve in it force, or tue in its surface meaning but false i it
underlying assumptons.
And to m extent the 'false consciousness' thesis
need not be signilcandy shaken by the recognton tt not aideological
language caracterizes the world i erroneous ways. To speak, however, of
'false asumptons' broaches a momentous topic. For someone might argue
that a sttement like 'Being Britsh is a vitue i itself' is not false in the same
sene that it is false to beleve that Ghengis K is alve and well and
runnng a boutque i the Bron. Is not this just to confuse to different
meanigs of the word 'false'? I may happen not to believe that being Britsh
is a virtue in itelf but ths is just my opinion, and is surely not on a level
wth declaratons like 'Paris is the capital of Aghanistan', whic everyone
would agee to bfactually untue.
Wat side you take up in ths debate depends on whether or not you are
a moral reaist 20 One kid of opponent of moral realsm wants to hold tat
our discourse divides into two distnct kinds: those speech act which aim to
describe the way things are, which involve criteria of truth and falsir and
those whc express evaluatons and prescriptions, which do not. On this
view, cogntve language is one thing and normatve or prescriptve language
quite another. A moral realist by contast, refuses ths binary oppositon of
'fact' and 'value' (which h in fact deep rot in bourgeois philosophical
hstory), . and 'denies that we can draw any intelligible distncton between
those part of assertoric discourse which do, and those which do not,
genuinely decrbe reality'?1 On this teor, it is mistaken to think tat our
language separates out into steel-hard objectvism and sogy subjectvism,
into a realm of indubitable physical fact and a sphere of precariously
foatng values. Moral judgements are as much candidates for ratonal
argumentation as are the more obviously descriptve parts of our speech. For
a realist, such normative statements purport to describe what is the case:
there are 'moral facts' as well as physical ones, about which our judgements
can be said to be either true or false. That Jews are inferior beings is quite as
fase as that Pa is the capital of Afghanstan; it isn't just a queston of my
private opinion or of some ethcal posture I decide to assume towards the
world. To declare that South Africa is a racist society is not just a more
imposing way of saying that I happen not to like the set-up in Sout Africa.
One reason why moral judgement do not seem to us as solid as judge
ments about the physical world is that we live in a society where there are
fundamental conicts.of value. Indeed the only moral case which the liberal
pluralist would rule out is one whic would interfere with this free market
I/
Ideolog
i values. Because we carot agree at a fundamentl level, it i temptng to
believe that values are somehow free-foatng - tat moral judgement
cannot be subject to crteria of truth and falsehood because tese criteria are
as a matter of fact in considerable disarray. We can be reasonably sure about
wheter Abraham Lincoln was taller than four feet, but not about whether
there are circumstances in which it is permssible to k.The fct tat we
cannot currently arrive at any consenus on this matter, however, is no
reason to assume that it is just a queston of some unarguable personal
option or intuiton. Whether or not one is a moral realist, then, wil make a
dif erence to one's assessment of how far ideological language involves false
hood. A morl realist will not be persuaded out of te 'false consciousness'
case just because it can be shown tat some ideological proposition is
empirically true, since that propositon might always be shown to encoe a
normatve claim that was in fact false.
All of this has a relevance to the widely infuental theory of ideology
proposed by the French Marxist phlosopher Louis Althusser. For Altusser,
one can speak of descrptions or representations of the world as. being either
true or false; but ideology is not for him at root a matter of such descrptions
at all, and criteria of truth and falsehood are thus largely irrelevant to it.
Ideology for Athusser does indeed represent - but what it represents is the
way I 'live' my relations to society as a whole, which cannot be said to be a
queston of tuth or falsehood. Ideology for Athusser is a particular organ
ization of signifing practices which goes to consttute human beings as
social subjects, and whch produces the lived relations by which such
subjects are conected to the dominant relations of production in a societ.
Aa term, it covers all the various politcal modalites of such relations, from
an identifcaton with the dominant power to an oppositional stance towards
it. Though Althusser thus adopt the broader sense of ideology we have
exmined, hs tnking about the topic, as we shall see later, is covertly
constrained by an attention to te narrower sense of ideology as a dominant
formation.
There is no doubt that Althusser strikes a lethal blow at any purely
rationalistic theory of ideology - at the notion that it consist simply of a
collecton of distortng representatons of reality and empirically false
propositons. On the contrary, ideology for Atusser alludes in te min to
our afective, unconscious relations with the world, to the ways in which we
are pre-reflectvely bound up in social reality. It is a matter of how that
reality 'strikes' us in the form of apparently spontaneous experence, of the
18
Wht LIeolog?
ways i whic human subjects are ceaelesly at stak in it invet i thei
relations to social iife as a crucial part of what it is to b themselves. One
might say that ideoloy, rther like poufor the literary critc I.A Richds.
is less a matter of propositons t of 'pseudo-propositons'P It appear
often enough on its grammatcal surface to be referental (descriptve of
states of affairs) while being secretly 'emotve' (expressive of the lived realit
of human subjects) or 'conative' (directed towards the achevement of
certain effects). If ths is so, then it would seem tat tere is a kind of slipper
iness or duplicity built into ideological language, rater of te kind tat
Immanuel Kant thought he had discovered in the natre of aesthetic judge
ments.23 Ideology. Altusser U, 'expresses a will. a hope or a nostlgia,
rater than describing a reality';2 it is fundamentally a matter of fea and
denouncin, reverencing and reviling, all of whch then sometmes get
coded into a discourse whch looks as though it is describing the way things
acrally are. It is thus, in the terms of the phlosopher J.. Austn, 'performa
tve' rather than 'constatve' language: it belongs to the class of speech acts
which get something done (cursing, persuading, celebratng and so on)
rater than to the discourse of descripton25 A pronouncement like 'Black is
beautul', popular in the days of the Aerican civil right movement look
on the surface as though it is characterizing a state of afairs, but is in fact of
course a rhetorical act of defance and self-afrmation.
Althusser tries to shift us, then, from a cognitive to an afctive theory of
ideology - which is not necessarily to deny that ideology contains certain
cognitive elements, or to reduce it to the merely subjectve'. It is certainly
subjectve in the sense of being subject-centred: its utterances are to b
deciphered as expresive of a speaker's atttudes or lived relatons to the
world. But it is not a queston of mere private whim. To assert that one
doesn't like tinkers is unlikely to have te same force as assertng that one
doesn't like tomatos. The latter aversion may just be a private quirk; the
former is likely to involve certain beliefs about the value of rootedness. self
dicipline and the dignity oflabour which are cental to te reproducton of
a partcular social system. On the model of ideology we are eamining, a
statement like 'Tinkers are a fea-ridden, thieving bunch of layabouts' could
be decoded into some such performatve utterance as 'Down wth tinkers!'.
and this in tur could be decoded into some such proposition as 'There are
reasons connected wit our relatons to the dominant social order whch
make us want to denigrate these people.' It is worh noting, however, that if
the speaker himself could effect the second decodement he would already
I
Ideolog
b well on the way to overcomng his prejudice.
Ideologcal statements, ten. would seem to be subjectve but not private;
and in this sense too tey have an afnit wth Kant's aestetic judgements,
whic are at once subjectve and universaL On the one hand, ideoloy is no
mere set of abstract doctines but the stuf which makes us uniquely what
we are, contitutve of our very identtes; on the other hand, it presents itelf
a an 'Everybody knows that', a kind of anonymous universal truth.
(hether al ideology unversalies i t way ua queston we shall tke up
later.) Ideolog is a set of viewpoint I happen to hold; yet that 'happen' is
somehow more tan just foritous, as happening to prefer parng my hair
down te middle is probably not. It appears often enough a a ragbag of
impersonal, subjectess tgs and adages; yet these shop-soiled platrdes are
deeply enough entwned wt the roots of personal idett to impel us
fom tme to tme to murder or martyrdom. In the sphere of ideology,
concrete partcular and universal tuth glide ceaselessly in and out of each
other, by-pasing 'the mediaton of ratonal analysis.
If ideology i les a matter of representatons of realit tan of lved
relaton, do ts fmally put paid to te ttfalsehod issue? One reaon
to th that it might is that it is hard to see how someone could be
mstaken about teir lived experience. I may mstake Madonna for a minor
deity, but can I be mistaken about te feelings of awe tis inspires in me?
Te answer, surely, is tat I can There is no reason to believe in a post
Freudian er that our lved experience need be any less ambiguous dour
idea. I can be as mistken about my feelings as I can be about anytng else:
'I tought at the tme I was angry, but looking back I see tat I w afaid:
Perhaps my senton of awe at the sight of Madonna is just a defence against
my unconscious envy of her superior earng-power. That I am experi
encing something can't be doubted, any more tan I can doubt tt I in
pain; but what precisely my 'lived relaton' to te social order conist in may
be a more problematcal afair than the Atusserians sometmes seem to
m Perhaps it is a mistke to imagine that Altusser is speaking here
primary of consciou eperience, since our lived relaton to soial realit are
for m largely unconcious. But i our conscious experience is elusive and
indetete - a point which tose politcal radicals who appeal dogma
tcal y to 'experience' a some sort of absolute fai to recoge - ten our
unconscious life i even more so.
Tere i anoter, rather diferent sense in which te categories of tuth
and falsehood may be said to apply to one's lived experience, whic retur
Z0
Wht LIeolog?
us to the issue of moral realism. I really am furious that my teenage son has
shaved of his hair and dyed his skull a famboyant purple, but I retin
enough shreds of ratonalit to ackowledge that ts feeling is 'false' - in te
sense of being, not illusory or a self-misinterpretaton, but one based upon
false values. My anger is motvated by the false belief that teenagers ought to
appear in publc like bank managers, that they should be socally conformist
and so on. One's lived experience may be false in te sense of ' inautentic',
untrue to those values which can be held to be defnitve of what it is for
human beings in a particular situaton to live well. Fr a moral realist of
radical persuasion, someone who believes tat the highest goal in life is to
amass as much private wealth as possible preferably by grinding oters into
te dust, is just as muc in error as someone who believes tat Henry Gibson
is the name of a Noregian playwright
Althusser may be right that ideology is chiefy a queston of 'lived
relatons'; but there are no such relatons which do not tacitly involve a set of
belief and assumptions, and these beliefs and assumptions may temselves
be open to judgements of tuth and falsehood. A racist is usually someone in
the grp of fear, hatred and insecurity, rater than someone who has dis
passionately arrved at certain intellectual judgements on oter races, but
even ifhis feelings are not motivatd by such judgements, they are likely to be
deeply entwned wit tem; and these judgements - that certain races are
inferior to others, for example - are plainy false. Ideology may indeed be
primarily a matter of perfonnatve utterances - of imperatves like 'Rule,
Britanna!', of optatves like 'May Margaret Thatcher reign for another
thousand years!', or interrogatves like 'Is not ts naton blessed under
heaven?' But each of these speech acts is bound up wth thoroughly
questonable asumptons: that Britsh imperialism is an excellent thing, that
another thousand years of Thatcher would have been a deeply desirable state
of affair, that there exists a supreme being with a partcular interet in
supervising the naton's progress.
Te Althusseran case need not be taken as denying tat judgements of
tuth and falsehood may be at some level applicable to ideological discourse;
it may simply be arguing that within such discourse the affectve tpically
outeighs the cognitve. Or - which is a somewhat different matter - that
te 'practco-social' takes predomnance over theoretcal knowledge.
Ideologies for Althusser do contain a kind of knowledge; but they are not
prmarl
y
cognitve, and te knowledge in queston is less theoretcal (which
is stctly spe for Althusser the only kind of knowledge there is) than
2I
Ideolog
pragmatc, one whc orients the subject to its practcal tk in society. In
fact, however, many apologists for tis case have ended up effectvely
denying the relevance of truth and falsehood ideology altogether. Para
mount among such theorists in Britain has been the sociologist Paul Hirst,
who argues that ideology cannot be a matter of false consciousness because
it uindubitably real 'Ideology . . . is not illusion, it is not falsity, because how
can something which has efects be false? . . . It would be like saying that a
black pudding is false, or a steamroller is false.'26 It is easy enough to see what
kid of logical slide is taking place here. There is a confusion between 'false'
as meanng 'untrue to what is the case', and 'false' as meaning 'unreal'. (As if
someone were to say: 'Lying isn't a matter of falsehood; he really did lie to
mel') It is quite possible to hold that ideology may sometmes be false in te
frst sense, but not in the second. Hirst simply collapses te epistemologcal
questions at stake here into oncological ones. It may be that I really did
experience a group of badgers in tartan tousers nbbling my toes the other
evening, but ths was probably because of those strange chemical substances
the local vicar administered to me, not because they were actually there. On
Hirst's view, one would have no way of distinguishng between dreams,
hallucinatons and reality. since all of them are actually experienced and all
of them can have real effects. Hirst's manoeuvre here recalls the dodge of
those aestheticians who, confronted with the knotty problem of how art
relates to realit, solemnly remind us that art is indubitably real.
Rather tan ditching the epistemological issues altogether a la Hirst, it
might be more usefl to ponder the suggestion that ideological discourse
typically displays a certain ratio between empirical propositons and what
we might roughly term a 'world view', in whic te latter has the edge over
the former. The closest analogy to this is perhaps a literary work. Most
literry works contain empirical propositions; they may mention, for
example, that there is a lot of snow in Greenland, or that human beings
typically have two ears. But part of what is meant by 'fctionality' is tt
these statements are not usually present for their own sake; they act, rather,
a 'support' for te overall world view of te text itsel Ad the ways in
which these empirical statements are selected and deployed is generally
governed by this requirement. 'Constative' language, in other words, is
harnessed to 'performative' ends; empirical truths are organized as com
ponents of an overall rhetorc. If that rhetoric seems to demand it, a partcular
empirical trut may be bent into falsehood: a hstorical novel may fnd it
more convenient for its suasive strategies to have Lenin live on for another
22
What I Ideolog?
decade. Simlarly, a racist who believes that Asian in Brtan wil oumumber
whtes by the year 1995 may well not be persuaded out of his racism if he
can be shown that massumpton is empirically false, since the propositon
is
more likely to be a support for his racism than a reason for it. If the claim
is disproved he may simply modif it, or replace it with another, tue or
false. It u possible. then, to think of ideologcal discourse a a complex
netork of empircal and nonnative elements, witin whch the nature and
organaton of the former is ultimately detenned by the requirements of
the later. And dmay be one sene in which an ideologcal formaton u
rather like a novel.
Once again, however, this may not be enough to dispose of the truth
falsity issue, relegatng it to the relatvely superfcial level of empirical state
ments. For tere is stll the more fundamental queston of whether a 'world
view' may not itelf be considered tue or false. The ant-faIse-consciousness
case would seem to hold that it is not possible to falsif an ideology, rather as
some literary crtics insist that it is not possible to falsif or verif the world
view of a work of art. In bot cases, we simply 'suspend our disbelief and
examine the profered way of seeing on its own tenns, grasping it a a
symbolic expression of a certain way of 'living' one's world. In some senses,
ths is surely true. If a work of literature chooses to highlight images of
human degradaton, then it would seem futle to denounce das somehow
incorrect. But there are surely limits to tis aesthetc charity. Literary critc
do not always accept the world view of a text 'on its own terms'; they some
tmes want to say that this vision of things is implausible, distortng, over
simplifing. If a literry work highlights images of diseae and degradaton
to the point where it tacitly suggests tt human life is entrely valueless.
then a critc might well want to object tt this is a drastcally partl way of
seeing. In this sense, a way of seeing, unlike a way of walkng, is not necessar
ily immune to judgements of tuth and falsehood, although some of it
aspect are likely to be more immune tn others. A world view will tend to
exhibit a cerrin 'style' of percepton, which cannot in itelf be sad to be
either true or faIse. It is not false for Samuel Beckett to pomay the world i
spare, costve, minimalst terms. It wil operate in accordance with a cm
'granuar', a system of rules for organizing it various elements, whch again
cannot usefully bspoken of in terms of tuth or falsehood. But it will also
typically contain other sorts of component, both normative and empircal,
which may indeed sometmes be inspected for their tuth or falsity.
Another suggestve analogy beteen literature and ideology may be
23
Ideolog
gleaned fom the work of the literary theorist Paul de Mn Fr de m a
piece of writ i specfcally 'lterry' when it 'consttve' and 'performa
tve' dimensions are somehow at odds wit each other27 Literary works, in
de Man's ve, tend to 'say' one tng and 'do' anoter. Thus, W.B. Yeat's
line of poety, 'How can we know te dancer fom the dance?', read literay,
aks about how we c draw the distncton in quetop but its efect' as a
rhetorical or performatve piece of discourse is to suggest that suc a distnc
ton canot b drawn. Whether d w do as a general teor of the
'literary' is in my ve distnctly dubious; but it can be coupled with a
certain theor of the workngs of ideology, one outlined by Denys Turer.
Tuer h argued tat one notable problem in the theor ofideology tr
on the puz le of how ideologcal belefs can be said to be both 'lived' and
false. Fr our lved belef are in some sense inter to our socal practces;
and uthey are thus contitutiv of those practces, tey can hardly be said to
'correspond' (or not correspond) to them. A Trner pUts it: 'Since, there
fore, there seems to be no epistemic space between what is socaly lved ad
te social idea of it, there seems to be no room for a fle relatonhp
between the twO.28
,surely, is one of the stongest point whch the ant-false-oncious
nes cae h going for it There canot be a merely external or contngent
relaton between our social prctces and the idea by whch we 'lve' them;
so how c these idea, or some of them, be said to be false? Turer's own
aner to this problem resembles de Man's case about the lterr text. He
claims tat ideology consist in a 'performatve contadicton', in whch what
i said is at ods with the sitaton or act of utterance itel When the
middle clas preaces universal feedom from a positon of dominaton or
when a teacer hectors his stdents at tedious length about te perls of an
authoritarian pedagogy, we have 'a contadicton between a meanin
conveyed eplicitly and a me conveed by the act itelf of conveying?'
whic for Turer is the essental stcture of all ideology. Whether m in
fct covers al tat we ideological practce is perhaps a doubtul a
whether de Man's cae covers al that we call litertre; but it is an illumin
atng account of a partcular kind of ideological act
So far we have been considering te role wt ideology of what might
be called eiteic falsehood. But a Raymond Geuss has argued, there are
to other forms of falsity highly relevant to ideological conciousness,
whc can be termed functional and ymt|c' False conciousness may mean
not tat a body ofideas is actually untue, but tat these ideas are functonal
Z1
Wt LIdeolog?
for the maintenance of an oppressive power, and tat those who hold tem
are ignorant of dfact. Similarly, a belief may not be false in itself but may
spring fom some discreditable ulteror motve of whch tose who hold it
are unaware. A Geuss summares te point: consciousness may be false
because it 'incorporate beliefs which are false, or because it functon in a
reprehenible way, .r because it ma tinted origin'Y Epistemic, functonal
and genetc forms of false consciousness may go togeter, as when a false
belief
which Tatonalizes some disreputable social motive proves useful in
promotng te unjust interests of a dominant power; but other permutations
are also possible. There may, for example, be no inherent connection
beteen the falsity of a belief and its functonality for an oppressive power; a
tue belief might have done just a well. A set of ideas, wheter tue or false,
may be 'unconsciously' motvated by te selsh interest of a ruling group,
but may in fact prove dysfunctonal for te promoton or legitmaton of
tose interets. A fatalistc group of oppressed individuals may not recognize
tat teir fatalism is an unconscious ratonalizaton of teir wretched
conditons, but ths fatalism may well not prove serviceable for their
interests. It might, on the oter hand, prove functonal for the interests of
teir rulers, in whch cae a 'genetc' false consciousness on the part of one
social class becomes functonal for the interests of another. Beliefs functional
for a social group, in other words, need not be motvated from within that
group, but may, so to speak, just fall into its lap. Forms of consciousness
functonal for one social clas may also prove functonal for another whose
interests are in confict with it. As far as 'genetc' falsity goes, the fact that the
true underlying motvaton of a set of beliefs sometmes mut be concealed
from view is enough to cast doubt on its reputability; but t hold that the
beliefs whch disguise this motive must be false simply on account of teir
contaminated origin would be an instance of the genetc fallacy. From a
radical politcal viewpoint, tere may be positve kinds of unconscious
motvaton and positve forms of functonality: socialists will tend to
approve of forms of consciousness whch however displacedly, express the
underlying interet of the workng class, or which actvely help to promote
. tose interets. The fact that a motvaton is concealed, in other words, is not
enough in itself to suggest falsity; the queston is rather one of what sort of
motvaton it is, and whether it is of the kind that ha to remain hidden from
view. Finally, we can note that a body of beliefs may be false but ratonal, in
te sense of interally coherent, conistent with te available evidence and
held on what appear to be plausible grounds. The fact that ideology is not at
Z>
Ideolog
root a matter of reason does not licene us to equate it with irraton
ality.
Let us take stock of some of the argument so far. Those who oppose the idea
of ideology as false consciousness are right to see that ideology is no baseless
illusion but a solid reality, an actve material force which must have at least
enough cogntive content to help organize the practcal lives of human
beings. It does not consist primarily in a set of propositions about the world;
and many of the propositons it does advance are actally true. None of this,
however, need be denied by tose who hold that ideology often or typically
involves falsity, distortion and mystifcaton. Even if ideology is largely a
matter of ' lived relatons', those relatons, at least in certain social conditibns,
would often seem to involve claims and beliefs whic are untrue. A Tony
Skillen scathngly inquires of those who reject this case: 'Sexst ideologies do
not (distortngly) represent women as naturally inferior? Racist ideologies do
not conne non-whtes to perpetual savagery? 'Religious ideologies do not
represent the world as the creaton of gods?'32
It does not follow from this, however, that al ideological language
necessarily involves falsehood. It is quite possible for a ruling order to make
pronouncements whch are ideological in te sense of butressing its own
power, but which are in no sense false. Ad if we extend the term ideology
to include oppositional political movements, then radicals at least would
want to hold that many of their utterances, while ideologcal in the sense of
promoting their power-interests, are nonetheless true. Ths is not to suggest
that such movements may not also engage in distorton and mystifcation.
'Workers of the world, unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains' is in
one sense obviously false; workers have a good deal to lose by politcal
militancy, not least, in some cases, their lives. 'The West is a paper tiger',
Mao's celebrated slogan, is dangerously msleading and triumphalist.
Nor is it the case that all commtment to the dominant social order
involves some sort of delusion. Someone might have a perfectly adequate
understanding of the mecansms of capitalist exploitaton. but conclude
that ths knd of society, while unjust and oppressive, is on the whole prefer
able t any likely alternatve. From a socialist viewpoint, such a person is
mistaken; but it is hard to call them deluded, in the sense of systematically
misinterpreting the real situation. There is a difference between being
mstaken and being deluded: if someone lifts a cucumber and announces hs
telephone number we may condude that he has made a mistake, whereas if
Z
Wat I Ideolog?
h
e spends long evenings chatting vivaciously into a cucumber we might
have to draw diferent conclusions. Tere is also the case of the person who
commits hmself to ' the ruling social order on entrely ccal grounds.
Someone who urges you to get ric quick may be promotn capitalist
values; but he may not necessarily be legitimating these values. Perhaps he
simply believes that in a corrupt world you might a well pursue your own
self-interest along with everyone else. A man might appreciate the justce of
the feminist cause, but simply refuse to surrender his male privilege. It is
unwise, in other words, to assume that dominant groups are always vict
of their own propaganda; there is the conditon which Peter Sloterdik calls
'enightened false consciousness', which lives by false values but is ironically
aware of doing so and so which can hardly be said to be mystfed in the
tditonal sense of the eeo.33
If dominant ideologies very often involve falsity, howeer, ie is party
because most people are noe in fact cynics. Imagine a society in which every
body was either a cynic or a masochst, or both. In such a situation there
would be no need for ideology, in the sense of a see of discourses concealing
or legitimating injustice, because te masochists would not mnd their
suffering and the cynics would feel no unease about inhabiting an exploita
tive social order. In fact, the majority of people have a fairly sharp eye to
eheir own rghts and interests, and most people feel uncomfortable at ehe
thought of belonging to a seriously unjust foo of life. Either, then, they
must believe that these injustces are en route eo being amended, or tat they
are counterbalanced by greater benefts, or that they are inevitable, or that
they are not really injustces at all. It is part of the functon of a dominane
ideology to inculcate such beliefs. It can do this either by falsifing social
realit, suppressing and excluding certain unwelcome features of it, or
suggestng that these features canot be avoided. Ths last strategy is of
interest fom te viewpoint of the trthfalsit problem. For it may be tre
of te present system ehat, say, a degree of unemploymene is inevitable, bue
noe of some future alternatve. Ideological statements may be tre eo society
as at present constitted, but false in so far a they thereby sere eo block of
the possibilir of a trnsformed state of affairs. The very trth of such state
ments is also ehe falsehood of their implicit denial that anytng better could
be conceived.
If ideology is sometimes falsifing, then, it is for what are on te whole
rather hopefl rasons: the fact that most people react strongly eo being
unjuscly teated, and that mose people would like to believe thae they live in
Z/
Ideolo
reasonably just social conditons. It is stange in ths light for some radicals
to argue tat decepton and concealment play no part in a dominant
ideological discourse, since to b a politcal radical commts one to te vew
that te curent social order is marked by serious injustces. And no ruling
class concere wit preserv it credibilit can af ord to acnowledge
that these ijustce could only b rected by a politcal transformaton
whch would put it out of business. If then, ideolog sometimes involves
distorton and mystcaton, it i less because of something inherent in
ideological language ubecause of something inherent in te social struc
ture to whic that language belon. Tere are certan kinds of interest
wc can secure teir sway only by prctsing duplicit; but dis not to
claim on the oter hand tat all of te sttement used to promote those
interests w be duplicitous. Ideology, i other words, is not inherendy
conttuted by distorton, especially if we take te broader view of the
concept as denotng any fairly cental conjuncture beteen discourse and
power. In an entrely just society, tere would be no need for ideology in te
pejoratve sense sice tere would b not to explain away.
It is possible to defne ideolog- in roughly six diferent ways, in a
progresive sharpening of focus. We can mean by it, frst, the general
material process of producton of ideas, beliefs and values in social lfe. Such
a defmiton is bot poltcally and epistemologically neucal, and is dose to
te broader meaning of the term 'culture'. Ideology, or culture, would here
denote te whole complex of signifng pratces and symbolic processes in
a partcular society it would alude to the way individuals 'lived' their social
practces, rater than to tose practce temselves, whic would be te
preserve of poltcs, economics, kinshp theory and so on. Ts sense of
ideology uwider ute sene of 'culture' whch confnes itelf to artstc
and intelectual work of agreed value, but narrower than te antropological
defmton of culture, whc would encompass all of te practces and
insttutons of a form of lie. 'Culture' i this anthopological sense would
iclude, for example, the fnancial infastucture of sport, whereas ideology
would concer itself more partcularly wit the signs, meanings and values
encoded in sportng actvites.
Tis most general of al meanings of ideology stresses the social deter
minaton of tought, tus providing a valuable antdote to idealism; but
otherwse it would seem unworkably broad and suspiciously silent on te
queston of politcal confct Ideolo means more tanjust, say, the signi
ing prctces associated by a society with food; it involves the relaton
28
Wt LIdeolog?
between tese sigs and proesses of politcal power. It i not coetensive
wt te generl feld of 'cultre', but ligt up cs feld from a partcula
angle.
A second, slghtly les general meaning of ideology tn on ideas and
beliefs (wheter tue or false) whic symbolie te conditons and life
eprences of a specc, socially signifcat group or clas. Te qualicaton
'sol y signifcant' is needed here, since it would seem odd to speak of the
ideas and beliefs of four regular drnng companions or of the Sixth Frm
at Mancheter GrmSchool a a ideology z of its own. 'Ideology' is
here ver close to the idea of a 'world view', tough it can be claimed that
world views ae usually preocupied wit fundamental matters such as te
meaning of deat or humant's place in the unverse, whereas ideology
might extend to suc issues a which colour to paint the mail-boxes.
To see ideology as a knd of collectve symbolic self-xpression is not yet
to see it i relational or confictve ters; so tere mght seem to be a need
for a third defniton of te ter, which attends to te promotion and
legitimation of the interests of suc social groups in the face of opposing
interests. Not all such promotions of group interest are usually dubbed
ideologcal: it i not partculaly ideologcal for te any to requet te
Mst of Defence to supply it on aetetc grounds with fared tousers
rater tan wit straight ones. The interests in queston must have some
relevance to the sust or challenging of a whole poltcal form of life.
Ideology c here be seen a a discurive feld i whch sel-promotng socal
powers confict and collide over questons central to te reproducton of
social power as a whole. Ths defniton may entail te assumpton that
ideoloy is a peculiarly 'acton-oriented' discourse, in whc contemplatve
cogniton i generlly subordiated to te futherance of 'aratonal' interest
and desires. It i doubtess for cs reason tat to speak 'ideologcally' m
sometmes in the popula mnd a rng of distasteful opportnism about it,
sugestng a readiness to sacrfce tut to less reputable goals. Ideology
appears here a a suasive or rhetorical rather tan veridical kind of speech,
concered les wit te situaton 'as it is' dwit the producton of certain
useful efects for politcal purposes. It is ironic, then, that ideology is
regarded by some as too prgmatc and by others as not pragmatc enough,
a to absolutst oterorldly and iexible.
A fourt meaning of ideology would retain this emphasis on te promo
ton and legitmation of sectoral interests, but conne it to the activities of a.
domnant social power. Ts may involve te asumpton tat suc
29
Ieolog
dominant ideologies help to uni a social fonaton in ways convenient for
its rulers; that it is not simply a matter of imposing ideas from above but of
securing the complicit of subordinated classe and groups, and so OI .We
shall be examining these assumptions more closely later on. But this
meaning of ideology is stll epistemologically neutal and can thus be
refned frther into a ffth defnition, in which ideology signifes ideas and
beliefs whch help to legitmate the interests of a rulin group or class
specifcally by distortion and dissimulaton Note dt on these last two
defnitons, not all of the ideas of a ruling group need be said to be ideo
logical, in that some of them may not particularly promote its interests, and
some of them may not do so by the use of deception Note also that on ths
last defmton it is hard to know what to call a politcally oppositional
discourse whch promotes and seek to legitimate te interests of a sub
ordinate group or class by such devices as the 'naturaliig', unversalii
and cloakng of its real interests.
There is, fnally, the possibility of a sixth meanng of ideology, whic
retains an emphasis on false or deceptive beliefs but regards such beliefs as
arising not from the interests of a dominant class but from the material
structure of societ as a whole. The term ideology remains pejoratve, but a
class-genetic account of it is avoided. The most celebrated instance of this
sense of ideology, as we shall se, is Mar's theory of the fetishism of
commodite.
We can return fnally to the queston of ideology as 'lived relatons' rather
than empirical representatons. If this is ce, then certain important
politcal consequences follow from this view. It follows, for instance, that
ideology caIlot be substantally transfonned by ofering individuals tue
decriptons in place of false ones - that it is not in this sense simply a
mitak. We would not call a form of consciousness ideological just because it
was in factual error, no matter how deeply erroneous it was. To spea of
'ideological error' is to speak of n error with partcular kds of causes and
functions. A transfonnaton of our lived relatons to realit could be secured
only by a material change in that realit itel To deny that ideology is
primarily a matter of empirical representations, then, goes along with a
materialist theory of how it operates, and of how it might be changed. At the
same tme, it is important not to react so violenty against a ratonalistic
theory of ideology as to abstain from tying to put people right on matters of
fact. If someone really does believe that all childless women are thwarted and
embitered, intoducing him to as many ecstatc childfree women as possible
30
Wat LIeolog?
mght just persuade
him to' change his mind. To deny tat ideology i
fundamentally an afair of reason u not to conclude tat it is immune to
ratonal consideratons
altogether. Ad 'reaon' here would mean somet
lie: the knd of discourse that would result from as many people as possible
actvely partcipating in a discussion of these matters i conditons a free a
possible from domination.
31
2
IDEOLOG I C A L
S T R A TEG IES
BEFR advancig any further, it may b a well to ak whether te topic of
ideoloy really merit the atenton we are lavishing upon it. Ae ideas really
so iportt for poltcal power? Most theories of ideology have arisen from
witn the materialist taditon of toughc and it belongs to suc material
ism to b sceptcal of assigning any very high priorit to 'conciousness'
wd socal lfe. Certaiy, for a materialist teory, conciousness alone
cannot iitate any epocal change in histor and there may terefore be
tought to be somethig self-ontadictory about suc materialism
dogedly devotg itelf to an inquiry into signs, meanings and values.
A go example of te limited power of consciousness in socal lfe is te
soclled Thatcherite revoluton. The ai ofTatcherism has been not only
to tform the economc and politcal landscape ofBriam, but to efect an
upheaval in ideologcal value too. This consist in convertng te moder
ately pleasant people who populated te country when Thatcer frt
arved in Downing Steet into a thoroughly nasty bunch of callous. self
sek oafs. Uness most of the Britsh have become completely hideous
and disgustng caracters. Thatcerism h failed in its ai. Yet all the
evidence would sugest tat the Tatcerite revoluton h not occurred.
Opinon polls reeal tt most of te Britsh people stubbory continue to
adhere to the vaguely social democratc values tey espoused before
Ttcher as umed ofce. Whateer it w that kept her in Downng Steet,
33
Ieolo
g
ten, it canot primarily have been ideology. Thatcher was not where she
wa because te Britsh people loyally identfed with her values; she wa
where she was deit the fact that they did not. If there is indeed a 'domi
nant ideology' in contemporary Britain it does not appear to be partcularly
successful.
How then did Thatcher secure her power? The true answers may be a
good deal more mundane than any talk of 'hegemonic discourses'. She was
Prime Minster pardy on account of the eccentricites of the Britsh electoral
system, which can put a goverent rejected by most of the electorate into
power. She set ou t fom te beginning to break the power of organed
labour by deliberately fostering massive unemployment, thus temporarily
demoralizing a traditonally mlitant working-class movement. She succeeded
i wn the support of an electorally crucial skl ed statum of the
working class. She traded upon the wea disorganed nature of the politcal
opposition, exploited te cyncism, apathy and masochism of some of the
Britsh people, and bestowed material benefts on those whose support she
required. Al of these moves are caught up in ideological hectoring of one
kind or another but none of them is reducible to te question of ideology.
people do not actvely combat a politcal rgime which oppresses ther
it may not be because they have meekly imbibed its governing values. It may
be because they are too exhausted after a hard day's work to have muc
energy left to engage i politcal actvity, or because they are too fatalistic or
apathetc to see te point of such activity. They may be frightened of the
consequences of opposing the regime; or they may spend too much time
worrying about their jobs and mortgages and income t returns to give it
much tought. Ruling classes have at teir disposal a great many such
techniques of 'negative' social control, whch are a good deal more prosaic
and material than persuading their subjects that they belong to a master race
or exhortng them to identif with the destiny of the naton.
In advanced capitalist societes, the communicatons media are often felt
to be a potent means by which a dominant ideology is disseminated; but this
assumption should not go unquestoned. It is true that many of the British
working class read right-wing Tory newspapers; but research indicates that a
god proporton of these readers are either indifferent or actively hostle to
the politcs of tese jourals. Many people spend most of their leisure tme
watchng television; but if watcing television does beneft the ruling class, it
may not be chefy because it helps to convey its own ideology to a docile
populace. Wat is politcally important about television is probably les its
34
Ideological Strategie
ideological content than the act of watching it. Watching television for long
stetces confrms individuals in passive. isolated, privatzed roles. and
consumes a good deal of te tat could be put to productve politcal uses.
It is more a form of social control than an ideological apparatus.
This sceptcal view of the centrality of ideology in moder society fnds
expression in Th Dominant Ideolog Tesis (1980), by the sociologists N.
Abercrombie. S. Hill and B.S. Turer. Abercrombie and his colleagues are
not out to deny that dominant ideologies exist; but they doubt tat tey are
an important means for lending cohesion to a society. Suc ideologies may
efectvely unif the dominant class; but tey are usually much less
succesful, so they argue, in infiltatng the consciousness of teir sub
ordinates. In feudalist and early capitalist societes. for example, the mechan
isms for transmittng such idelogies to the masses were notably weak; tere
were no communicatons media or insttutions of popular education, and
many of the people were illiterate. Such channels of transmission do of
course fourish in late capitalism; but the conclusion that the subalter
classes have thus been massively incorporated into the world view of their
rulers is one which Abercrombie, Hill and Turner see ft to challenge. For
one thing, they argue, the dominant ideology in advanced capitalist societies
u internally fssured and contradictory, ofering no kind of seamess unity
for the masses to internalize; and for another ting the culture of dominated
groups and classes retains a'good deal of autonomy. The everyday discourses
of these classes, so the autors claim, is formed largely outside the control of
te ruling class, and embodies signifcant beliefs and values at odds with it.
what then does secure the cohesion of such social formations? Aber
crombie et al.s frst response to this query is to deny that such cohesion
exists; the advanced capitalist order is in no sense a successfully achieved
unity, riven as it is by major conficts and contradictons. But in so far as the
consent of the dominated to their masters is won at all, it is acheved much
more by economic than by ideological means. What Mar once called 'the
dull compulsion of the economic' is enough to keep men and women in
ceir place; and such Strategies as reformism - the ability of the capitalist
system to yield tangible benefts to some at least of its underlings - are more
crcial in this respect than any ideological complicity beteen the workers
and their bosses. Moreover, if the system survives, it is more on account of
soial divisions between the various groups it exploits than by virtue of some
overall ideological coherence. Tere is no need for those groups to endorse
or internalize dominant ideological values, as long as tey do more or less
35
Ideolog
what i required of them. Indee most oppressed people throughout histor
have signally not granted teir rulers such credence: governent hve been
more endured than admired.
Th Dominant Ideolo
g
Thsis represent a valuable corectve to a left
idealism whch would overestmate the signfcance of culture and ideology
for the maintenance of politcal power. Such 'culturalsm', peraive
toughout the 1 970s, was itel a reacton to an earlier Marist economism
(or economc reductonism); but in the view of Abercrombie and his co
autors it bent the stck too far in the other directon. When one em
phasizes, as Jacques Derrida once remarked, one alwys overemphasizes.
Marxist intellectals trade in ideas, and so are always chronically liely to
overate teir importance in society as a whole. There is notng crdely
economistc i claiming that what keeps people poltcaly quiescent is less
transcendental signifers than a concern over their wage pacets. By contrast
with te patician gloom of the late Franurt Scool, this case accords a
healty degree of respect to the experience of te eploited: tere is no
reaon to assume that teir politcal docility signals some gullible. full
blooded adherence to the doctrines of teir superiors. It may signal rather a
coolly realistc sene tat politcal mitancy, in a period when te capitalist
system is stll capable of conceding some materia advantages to those who
keep it in business, might be perious and ill-advised. But if the system ceases
to yeld such benefts, then this same realsm might well lead to revolt since
tere would be no large-scale internalizaton of the ruling vaues to stand in
the way of suc rebellion. Abercrombie et aL are surely right too to point out
that subaltern social groups often hve their own rich, resistant cultures,
whc cannot be incorporated witout a stuggle into the value-systems of
those who govern them.
Even so, they mght have bent the stck too far in their tur Their claim
that late capitalsm operates largely 'without ideology' is surely too strong;
and their summary dismissal of the dissembling. mystfcatory efects of a
r ideology has an implausible ring to it. The tuth, surely, u tat te
diffusion of dominant values and beliefs among oppressed groups in society
has some part to play in the reproduction of the system as a whole, but that
d factor has been typically exaggerated by a long tadition of Wester
Marxism for which 'ideas' are allotted too high a status. A Gramsci argued,
te consciousness of the oppressed is usually a contradictory amalgam of
values imbibed from tei rulers, and notions whch spring more directly
fom their practical experence. By lending too little credence to the
36
Ideological Stratgie
potentally incorporatve functons of a dominant ideology, Abercrombie
and h fellow-authors are sometes as muc i daner of over-simpl
m me. ambiguous conditon as are the left Jeremiahs who peddle the
illusion tat alpopular resistance h now been smothly managed out of
existence.
There are oter grounds on whic to queton the imprtnce of
ideology in advanced capitalist societes. You can argue, for example. tat
whereas rhetorical appeals to such public value played a cental role i the
'clasical' phe of the system, they have now been efectvely replaced by
purely tecoratc fors of management. A case of this kind is urged by
the Grman philosopher Jirgen Habermas, in his Tward a Rational Societ
(1970) and Lgitimation Cr (1 975); but one needs to distnguish here
beteen the view that 'ideology' has yielded to 'tecnology', and the thesis
that the more 'metphysical' forms of ideological contol have now gven
ground to 'technoratc' one. Ideed we shl see later tat for many
theorsts of ideolo, the very concept of ideology is synonymous with the
attempt to provide ratonal, techcal, 'scientc' ratonale for social
dominaton, rather than mythc, religious or metaphysical one. On some
such views, te system of late capitalism can be sad to operate 'all by itelf',
without any need to resort to dicurive justfcaton. It no longer, so to speak
has to pass through consciousnes; intead, it simply secures its own
reproducton by a manipuatve, incorporatve logic of which hu
subjects are the mere. obedient efects. It is not surprising that the theoretcal
ideology known as structuralism should have grown up injust this historical
epoch Capitlist society no longer cares whether we beleve in it or not it is
not 'consciusness' or 'ideology' whic welds it together, but its own
complex systemic operatons. case thus inert sometng of the later
M's insistence on the commodity as automatcally supplyng it own
ideology it is the routne material logic of everyday life, not some body of
docte, set of moraliing dcourses or ideological 'superstucture', whch
keeps the system tck over.
The point c be put in a diferent way. Ideology is essentally a matter of
meaning; but the conditon of advanced capitalism, some would suggest. is
one of perasive non-me. The say of utity and technology bleac
soial life of signfcance. subordiatg usevalue to the empty formalsm
of exce-value. Consumerism by-pases meaning in order to engage te
subject subll y. lbidinally. at the level of visceral response rather than
refectve conciousness. In d sphere. as i the realms of the media and
J/
Ideolog
eeryday cultre, form overhelms content, signifers lord it over signifeds.
to deliver us the blan. afeccless, todimensional surfaces of a post
moderst social order. This massive haemorhaging of meaning then
tiggers pathological symptoms in society at large: drugs, volence, mndless
revolt. befuddled searches for mystcal signcance. But otherse it fosters
widespread apathy and doclity, so that it is no longer a queston of whether
soial life has meaning, or whether this partcular signifcaton is preferable
to tat. tan of wheter such a queston is even intelgible. To tal about
'signcance' and 'society' in the same breath just becomes a kind of category
mistake, rather like huntng for the hidden meanng of a gust of wnd or the
hot of an owl. From ts viewpoint. it is less meaning that keeps us in place
d the lac of it. and ideology in its classical sense is thus superfuous.
Ideology, after ,require a cerain depth of subjectivity on which to go to
work, a certain innate receptiveness to its edicts; but uadvanced capitalism
fattens the human subject to a viewing eye and deouring stomach. then
there is not even enough subjectvity around for ideology to take hold. The
dwindled, faceless, depleted subject of this soial order are not up to
ideologicl meanng, and have no need of it Politcs is less a matter of
preacng or indoctrination tan tecical management and manipulation,
form rater tan content once more, it is as tough the machine runs itsel
wthout needing to tke a detour through the conscious mnd. Educaton
ceases to b a queston of critcal self-reflecton and becomes absorbed in its
t into the technological apparats, providing certficaton for one's place
wtn it. The tyical citzen is less te ideologcal entusiast shoutng 'Long
live liberty!' m te doped, glazed telly viewer, his mind as smoot and
neutally receptve as te screen in front of him. It ten becomes possible, in
a ccal 'left' wisdom, to celebrate this ctatonc stte as some cunlast
ditch resistnce to ideologcal me - to revel i te very spirital blank
nes of the late burgeois order as a welcome relief fom te boring old
humanist nostalgia for tUth, value and reality. The work of Jean BaudriUard
is exemplary of tis nlism. 'It i no longer a queston', Baudrilard writs,
'of a false representaton of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact tat
te real is no longer real . . .. ;
The cae that advanced capitalism expunge trace of 'deep' subject
ivity, and tus all modes of ideolog, is not so much false as drastcally
partal. In a homoeniing gestre ironically typical of a 'pluralistc' post
modersm, it fails to discriminate between diferent spheres of social eist
ence, some of whic are rather more open to this kd of analysis tan
38
Ieological Strtgie
others. It repeats the 'cultralist' error of taking television, supermarket, 'life
style' and advertising a denitive of the late capitalist experience, and passes
in silence over such actvities as studying the bible, running a rape crisis
centre, joining the territorial army and teachng one's chldren to speak
Welsh. People who run rape crisis centes or teach their chldren Welsh also
tend to watch television and shop in supermarkets; there is no question of a
single form of subjectivity (or 'non-subjectivity') at stake here. The very same
citizens are expected to be at one level the mere function of this or that act
of consumpton or media experience, and at another level to exercise ethical
responsibility a autonomous, self-determnng subjects. In this sense, late
capitalism contnues to require a self-isciplined subject responsive to
ideological rhetoric, as father, juror, pamot, employee, houseworker, while
threatening to undercut these more 'classical' forms of subjecthood with its
conumerist and mass-cultural practces. No individual life, not even Jean
Baudrillard's, can survive entirely bereft of meaning, and a society whch
took this nihlistic road would simply be nurturing massive social dis
ruptOIL Advanced capitalism accordingly oscillates between meaning and
non-meanng, pitched from moralism to cynicism and plagued by the
embarassing discrepancy between the two.
Tat discrepancy suggests anoter reason why ideology is sometmes felt
to be redundant in moder capitalist societes. For ideology is supposed to
deceive; and mthe cynical milieu of postmodersm we are all much to fy,
astte and streetwise to be conned for a moment by our own ofcial
rhetorc. It is dcondition which Peter Sloterdik names 'enlightened false
consciousness' - the endless self-ironing or wide-awake bad faith of a
society whch has seen through its own pretentious rationaliatons. One can
picture ths as a kind of progressive movement. First, a disparity sets in
between what society doe and what it says; then this performatve con
tadicton is ratond; next, the ratonaliaton is made ironically self
conscious; and fnally this self-ironiing itelf comes to sere ideological
ends. The new kind of ideological subject is no hapless victim of false
consciousness;
'
but knows exactly what he is doing; it is just that he continues
to do it even so. And to this extent he would seem conveniently insulated
against 'ideology critique' of the traditional knd, which presumes that
agents are not fully in possession of their own motivations.
There are several objectons to this partcular 'end of ideology' thesis. For
one thing, it spuriously generalies to a whole society what is really a highly
specifc mode of consciousness. Some yuppie stockbrokers may be cynically
39
Ideolog
aware tat there is no real defence for their way of life, but it i doubtul tat
Ulster Unionst spend much of their tme being playfully ironic about their
commitment to keeping Ulster Britsh. For another thing, such irony is
more likely to play into the hands of the ruling powers than to discomfort
them, as Slavoj Zi ek obseres: 'in contemporary societes, democratic or
totlitarian, . . . cyncal distance, laughter, irony, are, so to spea part of the
game. The ruling ideology is not meant to be tken seriously or literally.> It
is as though the ruling ideology has already accommodated the fact tat we
wil be sceptcal of it, and reorganized its discourses accordingly. The
government spokesman announces that there is no tt in the charges of
widespread corrupton witn the Cabinet nobody believes him; he knows
that nobody believes him, we know that he knows it, and he knows this to.
Meanwhile the corruption carries on - whic is just the point that Ziek
makes against the conclusion that false consciousness is therefore a thing of
the past One taditonal form of ideology critque asumes that social
practices are real, but that the beliefs used to justf tem are false or illusor.
But this oppositon, so Zi ek suggests, can be reversed. For if ideology is
illusion, ten it is an illusion whic stuctures our social practces; and to
dextent 'falsity' lies on the side of what we do, not necessarily of what we
say. The capitalist who ha devoured all tree volumes of Cpital knows
exactly what he is doing; but he contnues to behave as though he did not,
because his actvity is caught up in te 'objectve' fantasy of commodity
fetshism. Sloterdik's formula for enightened false consciousness is: 'they
know very well what they are doing, but they carry on doing it even so'.
Zek, by contst, suggests a crucial adjustent 'they know that in their
actvity, they are following an illusion, but stll, tey are doing it'. Ideology,
in other words, not just a matter of what I think about a situaton; it is
somehow inscribed in that situaton itelf It is no good my reminding
myself that I am opposed to racism as I sit down on a park bench marked
'Whites Only'; by the actng of sittng on it, I have supported and perpe
tuated racist ideology. The ideology, so to speak, is in the bench, not in my
head.
In much deconstctve theor, the vctat interpretaton consist in an
abyssal spiral of ironies, each ironizing the other to innity, is commonly
coupled with a politcal quietsm or reformsm. politcal practce te
place only within a context of interpretton, and if that context is notor
iously ambiguous and unstable, then aqion itelf is lkely to be problematc
and unpredictble. This case is then used, implicity or explicity, to rule out
10
Ideolo
g
ical Statie
te possibility of radical politcal programe of an abitous knd. Fr i
te comple efect of suc practces are impossible to clculate i advance
then the logic of such a radical programme of acton u ultmately ute:
able, and may easily get out of hand. It is a cae which the post-stuctralist
crtc Jonathan Culler, among oter, mseveral tmes argued. One would,
ten, be singularly ill-advised to attempt any very 'global' sor of politcal
actvit, suc a tying to abolish world hunger; it would seem more prdent
to stck to more local politcal interentons. suc as m sure every one
in fve professors you hie is an orphan fom Liverpool 5. In ts sene too,
irony is no escape from te ideological game: on the cont, a an implct
disrecommendaton of large-scale poltcal actvit. it plays rght ito te
hands of Wtehall or the Wte House.
It is in any case important not to underestmate the etent to whc
people may not feel ironic about their performatve contadictons. Te
world of big business is rife wt the rhetoric of mcbut reearc reveals
tat tis prnciple is almost never acted upon. The last tn busiessmen
actually do is put teir tust in tei custome or eac other. A corporaton
executve who claims tis virtue may not, however, ba cynic or a hypocrite;
or at least his hypocrisy may be 'objectve' rather t subjectve. Fr te
ethical values whic capitalism lauds, and it actal cut-throat practces,
simply move in diferent sphere, muc like the relatonhip beteen
religious absolutes and everyday life. I stl believe that profnit is a m
even tough my conversaton i blue wt it much of te tme. Te fact tat
I employ a team of si ,hard-pressed serant around te clock does not
prevent me from believin in some suitably nebulous way that almen and
women are equaL m an ideal world I would employ no serant at al , but
there are pressng pragmatc reason just at te moment why I a unble to
lve up to my burngy held belefs. I object to the idea of private educaton,
but if I were t place my daughter wit her airs and graces in a compre
hensive scool, the .other children mght bully her. Suc rtonalaton are
well-ng limtless, and ts is one reason to doubt te suggeston that in
. modem capitt society cold-eyed cynicism m entrely ousted genuine
self-ecepton.
We have seen that the importance of ideology can be quetoned on
several grounds. It can be claimed tat tere i no coherent domt
ideology, or that if tere is then it i muc les efectve i shaping popular
experience than hsometmes been thought. You c argue tat advanced
capitlism is a self-sustaining 'game' whic keeps us i place muc c
1l
Ieolog
troug ideas t by it materal tecques; and tat among tee
techques the coercion of the economic is far more efectve tan any sort
of seroning. Te system, so it is suggested. maintains itself less through
the imposton of ideologcal meaning tan trough detoying meaning
altogeter and what meanngs te masses do entertin can be at odds wit
tose of their rulers without any serious disrupton enuing. Finally, it may
be tat tere i a dominant ideology at work, but nobody is gullible enoug
to fal for it. Aof these case have their keel of tuth - not least the claim
that material factors play a more vital role in securng submssion tan
ideologcal ones. It is also surely true that popular conciousness is far from
bing some obdient 'intantaton' of ruling ideological values, but runs
counter to them in signifcant ways. If tis gap looms sufciendy wide, ten
a crisis oflegitmacy is lkely to enue; it i unrealistc to imagine that as long
as people do what is required of them, what they tnk about what they are
doing is neither here nor tere.
Taken as a whole, however, this end-of-ideology thesis is vastly im
plausible. If it were tue, it would be hard to know why so many individuals
in these societes still fock to churc, wrangle over polincs in the pubs, care
about what their chidren are being taught in scool and lose sleep over the
steady erosion of te social services. The dystopian view that the typical
citen of advanced capitalism is the doped tlly viewer is a myth. as the
ruling class itself is uncomfortably aware. The doped telly viewer wsoon
enough join a picket line if her wage-packet is threatened, or become
politcally actve if the government contemplates driving a motorway
trough his back garden. The 'left' cycism of a Baudrllard is insultingly
compHcit with what the system would hLto believe - that everyting now
'works all by itelf', witout regar to the way social issues are shaped and
defmed in popular experience. If that experience really was entely to
dimensional, then the consequences for the system would be gim. Fr the
result, a we have seen, would be an accelerated outbreak of 'pathological'
symptoms in society as a whole, as a citizenry deprived of meaning sought to
create it in violent, gratuitous ways. Any ruling order must throw its under
lings enough meaning to be going on wth; and if the logic of conumerism,
bureaucracy, 'instant' culture and 'managed' politics is to sap the very
resources of social signcance, then this is in te long run exceedingly bad
news for te governing order. Advanced capitalist society still requires the
dutful, self-discipled. intelligendy conformist subjects which some see as
tpical ony of cpitalism's 'classical' phae; it is just that these partcular
1Z
Ieolocal Stratgie
modes of subjectvit
are locked i confict wit the quite diferent forms of
subjecthood appropriate to a 'postnlodemist' order, and this is a contadic
ton which the system itself is quite powerless to resolve.
Raymond Geuss has suggested a useful distncton beteen 'descrptve',
'pejoratve' and 'positve' deftons of the term ideology.) In te descriptve
or 'anthropological' sense, ideologies are belief-systems characteristc of
certain social 'groups or classes, composed of both discursive and non
diScursive element. We have seen already how tis politcally innocuous
meaning of ideology comes close to the noton of a 'world view', in the sense
of a relatvely well-systemated set of categories which provide a 'frame' for
the belief percepton and conduct of a body of individuals.
In its pejoratve meanng, ideology is a set of values, meanings and beliefs
which is to be viewed critcally or negatvely for any of te followin
reasons. True or false, these beliefs are sustained by the (conscious or un
conscious) motvaton of propping up an oppressive form of power. If the
motvation is unconscious, then ths will involve a degree of self-deception
on the part of those who adhere to the beliefs. Ideology in ths sense means
ideas contaminated at root, genetcally fawed; and we shall see tat this was
the meaning of ideology embraced by the later frederick Engels. Alterna
tvely, ideology may be viewed critcally because the ideas and beliefs in
question, whether true or not, discreditably or deceptively motvated or not,
breed effects whch help to legitmate an unjust form of power. Finally,
ideology may be thought to be objectionable because it generates ideas
which eiter because of their motivation or their functon or both are in fact
false, in the sense of distortng and dissimulatng social reality. This is ob
jectonable not only because it contributes to shoring up a dominatve
power, but because it is contrary to the dignity of somehat rational
creatures to live in a permanent state of delusion.
Ideology in tis negative sense is objectionable either because it gives
birth to massive social illusion, or because it deploys true ideas to un
palatable efect, or because it springs fom some unworthy motivation. Tis
genetic fact is sometimes thought enough to render the belief in queston
eitmically false: since the beliefs have teir root in the life-experience of a
partcular group or class, te partality of that experience will bend tem out
of tre. They will persuade us to see the world as our rulers see it, not as it is
in itself Lurking in the background here is te assumpton that te tut
resides only in some form of totliation which would tanscend the
1J
Ieolog
confnes of any partcular group's perspectve.
What is sometmes felt to be primarily ideological about a form of
consciousness, however, is not how it comes about, or wheter it is true or
not, but the fact tat it is functonal for legitmatg an unjust social order.
From ts stndpoint, it is not te or
g
in of the ideas whc makes them
ideologcal. Not al of the idea which originate in the domnant clas ae
necessarily ideological; conversely, a ruling clas may take over ideas which
have gennnated elsewhere and harness tem to its purposes. The Englsh
middle class found the mystque of monarchy ready-made for it by a
previous ruling class, and adapted it efcienty to it own ends. Even form of
consciousness whic have their root in the experience of oppressed classe
may be appropriated by their masters. When Mar and Engels coment in
The Gean Ideolog that the ruling ideas of eac epoc are the ideas of the
rlg class, they probably intend this as a 'genetc' obseraton mean
that these ideas are ones actually
p
roduced by the ruling class; but it is possible
that these are just idea whch happen to be in the possession of the rulers,
no matter where they derive from. The ideas in queston may be true or
false; if they are false, they may be considered to b contngently so, or their
falsehood may be seen as the efect of the funtonal work they have to do in
promotng shay interests, or as a kind of buckling they undergo in stainng
to rtonalie shabby social motves.
But ideologies can also be viewed in a more positve light, as when
Marsts like Lenin speak approvingly of ' socialist ideology'. Ideolog mean
here a set of beliefs whch coheres and inspires a specic group or cas in the
pursuit of political interests judged to b desirable. It is then often in efect
synonymous with the positve sense of 'class consciousness' - a dubious
equaton in fact, since one could speak of those aspects of a class's conscious
ness whc are in this sense ideological, and those which are not. Ideology
might srill be viewed here as ideas importantly shaped by an underlying
motvaton, and functonal in aceving serti goals; it is just that these
goals and motvations are now approved, a they were not in te case of a
class regarded as unjustly oppressive. One can use te teI ideology to
signf a certain elevaton of the prgmatc or instumental over a theoretical
concer for the truth of ideas 'in themselves', while not necessarily holding
this to be a ne
g
ative judgement. Indeed radicl thinkers as divergent a
Grges Sorel and Louis Althusser, as we shall see, have bot approvingly
seen 'socialst ideology' in ts pragmatc light
11
Ideological Stratgie
The broad defnton ofideology as a body of meanings and value encodin
certain interests relevant to social power is plainly in need of some fme
tnn. Ideologies are often thought, more specifcally, to be uniing; action
orentd, rationalizing, legitimating, univeraling and naturaliing. Wheter
tese fearres apply to oppositonal ideologies a wel a to domnant ones u
a queston we shall have to consider. Let u examine each of these assump
tons in rm. Ideologies are often thought to lend coherence to the groups or
classes which hold tem, welding tem into a unitr. u intel y
differentated, identty. and perhaps tereby allowin tem to ipose a
certn unit upon society as a whole. Since the idea of a coherent identty i
tese days somewhat unfahionable. it is wort adding tat such unit, in the
shape of politcal solidarity and comradely feeling, uquite as indispenable
to the success of oppositonal movements as it i part- of the anour of
dominant groups.
How unifed ideologies actally are. however. is a matter of debate. If
they strive to homogene. tey are rarely homogeneous. Ideologies are
usually interally complex, dif erentated formaton, with conict
beteen their various elements which need to be contnally renegotated
and resolved. What we call a domnant ideolog i typically that of
dominant social bloc. made up of classes and factons whose interest are not
alway at one; and these compromises and divisions will b refected in the
ideology itel Indeed it can be claied that part of the stength of
bourgeois ideology lies in the fact that it 'speaks' from a multplicity of sites,
and in tis subtle difuseness presents no single taret to its antagonst.
Oppositonal ideologies, siarly, usually refect a provisional al ce of
divere radical' forces.
If ideologies are not as 'pure' and unitary as they would like to tink
themselves, t is parly because they exist only in relaton to other ideo
logies. A dominant ideology h contnually to negotate with the ideologies
of its subordinates, and this essential open-endedness will prevent it from
acevng any knd of pure self-identty. Indeed what makes a dominant
ideolog powerful - its ability to intervene in the conciousness of tose it
subjects, appropriatng and reinflectn their experience - is also what tends
to make it interlly heterogeneous and inconistent. A successful rling
ideolog, as we have seen, must engage signfcantly with genuine wants,
needs and desires; but t ualso it Achil e heeL forcing it to recogne an
'other' to itself and incribing this oterness as a potentally disrptve force
within its own form. We might say in Bakhtnian term that for a
45
Ieolog
goveng ideology to be 'monological' - to address it subjects with
authoritarian certtude - it must simultaneously be 'dialogical'; for even an
authoritarian discourse is addressed to another and lives only in te other's
response. A dominant ideolog has to recognize that there are needs and
desires which were never simply generated or implanted by itself and the
dystopian vision of a social order which is capable of containing and
contolling al desires because it created them in the m place is thus
unasked as a Hcton. Ay ruling power requires a degree of intelligence
and initatve fom its subjects, if only for its own values to be interalized;
and ths resourcefulness is at once essental for the smoot reproduction of
the system and a permanent possibility of reading its edicts 'otherwse'. If the
oppressed must be alert enough to follow the rulers' instructons, they are
terefore conscious enough to be able to challenge tem.
for thnkers like Karl Mannheim and Lucien Goldmann, ideologies
would seem to display a high degree of internal unity. But tere are those
like Antonio Gramsci who would view them as complex, uneven
formatons, and theorits like Pierre Macherey for whom ideology is so
ambiguous and amorphous that it can hardly be spoken of as having a
signicnt stucture at all. Ideology for Macherey is the invisible colour of
daily life, too close to the eyeball to be properly objectfed, a centreless,
apparently limitless medium in which we move like a fsh in water, wth no
more ability than a fsh to grasp this elusive environment as a whole. One
cannot for Macherey speak in classical Marxist. style of 'ideological contra
dictons', for 'contadicton' implies a defnitve stuctre, of whch ideology
i its 'practcal' state i entrely bereft. One can, however, pUI ideology into
contradiction by imbuin it with a form whch highlights its hidden limits,
trusts it up against its own boundaries and reveals its gaps and elisions, thus
forcing it necessary silences to 'speak'. Tis, for Macherey, is the work upon
ideology which i accomplished by the literary text. If Macherey's theory
underestates te extent to which an ideolog i signfcantly stuctured,
one might claim that Georg Lukacs's noton of the revolutonary subject
overestmate the coherence of ideological consciousness.
A similar overestmation, ths tme of the dominant ideology, is to be
found f the work of the later Frankfurt School. Fr Herbert Marcuse and
Teodor Adoro, capitalist society languishes. in te grip of an all-perasive
reifcaton, al te way fom comodity fetshism and speech habits to
politca bureucracy and technological thought.s Ts seamless monolith of
a domnant ideology is apparently devoid of contadictons - which means,
46
Ideolo
g
ical State
in efect, that Marcuse and Adoro take it at face value, judging it as it
would wsh to appear. If reification exerts it sway eerywhere, then this must
presumably include the criteria by which we judge reifcation in the frst
place - in which case we would not be able to identif it at all. and the late
Frankfurt School critque becomes an impossibility. The final alienation
would be not to kow chat we were alienated. To characterie a situaton as
reifed or alienated is impiicitly to point to practices and possibilites which
suggest an alternative to it, and which can thus become criterial of our
alienated conditon. For Jurgen Habermas, as we shall see later, these possi
bilites are inscribed i te very structures of social communicaton; while
for Raymond Williams they spring from the complexity and contradictori
ness of all social experience. 'No mode of production', Williams arges, 'and
terefore no dominant social order and therefore no dominant culture ever
in realit includes or exhausts all human practce, human energy. and
human intenton.'o Every social formation is a complex amalgam of what
William terms 'dominant', 'residual' and 'emergent' forms of consciousness.
and no hegemony can thus ever be absolute. No sharper contrast could be
found than wit the later work of Micel Foucault, for whom regimes of
power constitute us to our very roots, producingjust those forms of subject
ivity on which they can most efciently go to work. But if ths is so, what is
tere 'left over', so to speak, to fnd tis situaton so appalling? What
including one Micel Foucault, could conceivably protest against this condi
tion, given that all subjectvity is merely the effect of power in te frst
place? If there is nothing beyond power, then there is nothing that is bein

blocked, categorized and regmented, and therefore absolutely no need to
worry. Fucault does indeed speak of resistances to power; but what exactly
is doin te resistng is an enigma his work does not manage to dispel.
Ideologies are often seen as peculiarly action-oriented sets of beliefs, rater
than speculative theoretical systems. However abstrusely metaphysical the
ideas in queston may be, the must be translatable by the ideological
discourse into a 'practical' state, capable of furnishing their adherents with
goals, motvatons, prescriptons, imperatves and so on. Wether ts will
do as an account of all ideology is perhaps doubtful: te kind of idealist
ideology under fre in Te Geran Ideolog is lambasted by Mar and Engels
precisely for its impractcality, its loft remoteness from the real world.
What is ideological about these beliefs for Marx and Engels is not that tey
pragmatcally orentate men and women to objectonable politcal actons,
47
Ideolo
but that they distct tem fom certin forms of practcal actvity
altogether.
A successful ideology must work both practcally and theoretcally. and
discover some way of linking tese levels. It must extend fom an elaborated
system of thought to the minutae of everyday life. from a scholarly treatise
to a shout in te street. Martn Seliger, in his Ideolog and Politic argues that
ideologies are typically mixtures of analytc and descriptive statement on
the one md, and moral and technical prescriptions on the other. They
combine in a coherent system factual content and moral commitment, and
this is what lends tem their acton-guiding power. At the level of what
Seliger calls 'operative ideology' we fnd 'implement' (rules for carng out
the ideology'S commitents) which may confict wit the ideology'S
fundamental principles. We are tus likely to fnd wthin an ideological
formaton a process of compromise, adjustment and tade-off beteen its
overall world view and its more concrete prescriptve element. Ideologies
for Seliger blend belief and disbeliefs, moral norms, a modicum of factal
evidence and a set of techcal prescriptons, all of whch ensures concerted
acton for te preseraton or reconstructon of a given social order.
Te Soviet philosopher VN. Voloshinov distnguishes beteen 'be
havioural' ideology and 'etablished system' ofideas. Behavioural ideology
concer 'the whole aggregate of life experiences and the outard expres
sions directly connected with it'; it signifes 'that atmosphere of unsystem
atsed and unxed inner and outer speech whch endows our every instnce
of behaviour and acton and our ever "concious". stte with meaning'.7
There is some relaton beteen ts concepton and Raymond Wilm's
celebrated noton of a 'structure of feeling' - tose elusive, impalpable forms
of social consciousness whch are at once a evanecent a 'feeling' suggest,
but neverteless display a signifcant confguraton captured i the term
'stucture'. 'We are t', Wil ams wrtes, 'about characteristc element
of impulse, restint and tone: specifcally afectve elements of conscious
ness and relatonhp: not feeling against tought, but tought as felt and
feeling a tought practcal consciousness of a preent kd i a liv and
interrelatng contnuity.'B
What suc a noton seeks to decontct is te familiar oppositon
beteen ideology as rigid, explicit doctrne on the one hand, and the
supposedly inchoate nature of lived experience on the other. This oppositon
is itself ideologically eloquent from what knd of social standpoint do
lived experience appear utterly shapeless and chaotc? Virina Woolf may
48
Ideologcal Sttge
well have experienced
her life in
dway, but her serant a les likely to
have regarded teir days a delcously fuid and ideteninace. The
doctrine goes hand in hand with the moderst banality thac the purpose of
a is to 'impose order upon caos'. Aainst t, te concept of behavioural
ideology or stucture of feelg reminds us that lived experience is always
tacidy shaped already, if ony in ambiguous, provisional way. Teoretcally
elaborate ideologies of a, science and etics are for Voloshinov 'crystl
ton' of d more fundamentl level of existence, but te relatonhp
between te to is dialectcal. Formal ideological systems must draw vital
sustenance from behaviourl ideology, or risk witering away; buc they also
react back powerfully upon it settng, as Voloshinov remarks, it 'tone'.
Even witin behavoural ideology, diferent stata can be distnguished.
What Voloshnov calls te lowest, most fuid statum of such consciousness
is made up of vague experiences, idle thoughts and random words which
fash across the md. But the upper levels are more vital and substantal,
and tese are the ones lied wit ideological systm. They are more
mobile and sensitve d an 'estblished' ideology, and it is in cs sub
limnal region that those creatve energies through which a social order may
be restructured frst geninate. 'Newly emerging social forces fnd ideo
logical expression and take shape frst in tese upper stta of behavioural
ideology before tey can succeed in domnatng te arena of some organ
ised, ofcial ideology.> A tese fresh ideological current infltate te
etablshed belief system, they will tend to cke on someting of teir for
and colourings, incorporating into temelves notons already 'in stoc'.
Once again, Voloshnov's thought r parallel here to Wil 's 'stuctre
of feelin'; for what Wilams is seeking to dee by that phrase is very often
te strring of 'emergent forms of consciousnes, ones which are stugglng
to break through but whic have not yet attained the formalized natre of
te belief systems they confont A Williams writes, 'there is always, tough
in va degrees, practcal conciousness, in specifc relatonhps, specifc
sklls! specifc perceptons, that is unquestonably social and tat the
specifcally dominant social order neglect, ecludes, represses, or simply
fas to recognise.'JO These soial experiences stll 'in soluton', actve and
pressing but not yet fully artculated, may of course always sufer icorpora
ton at te hands of the dominant culture, as Voloshinov acknowledges too;
but both thiners recoge a potental conict between 'practcal' and
'ofcial' forms of consciousnes, and te possibilt of variable relatons
beteen them: compromise, adjustent, incorporaton, outght oppositon.
1
Ieolo
They reject in other words, those more monoltc, pessimstc conceptions
of ideology which would see 'practcal consciousness' as no more than an
obedient instantaton of ruling ideas.
There u a clear afnt beteen ths distincton and what we shall see
later in Antonio Gramci as a discrepancy between ofcial and practcal
consciousness - between those notions which the oppressed classes derive
from their superiors, and those which arise from their 'life situations'. There
is a simlar oppositon in the work of Louis Althusser between 'theoretcal
ideologies' (the work of the bourgeois politcal economsts, for exmple) and
what he calls 'ideology i a practcal state'. Pierre Bourdieu's concept of
'habitus', whc we shall be examinng later, is an equivalent to 'practcal
ideology'. fousing upon the way ruling imperatves are actually tansmuted
into fons of routne social behaviour; but like Voloshinov's 'behavioural
ideology' it is a creatve, open-nded afair, in no sense a simple 'reflection'
of domnant ideas.
To study an ideologcal fonnation, then, is among other tngs to
examine the complex set of linkages or mediations beteen it most arti
culate and least artculate levels. Organized religion migt provide a useful
example. Suc relgion stetches from hghly abstuse metaphysical
doctrines to metculously detailed moral prescriptons governng the
routnes of everyday life. Religon uJUSt a way of bringng to bear the most
fundamental queston of human exstence on a uniquely individual life. It
also contains doctrines and rituals to ratonalize the discrepancy between the
two - to account for why I fail to live up to these cosmic truths, and (as in
confession) to adjust my daily behaviour to their demands. Rligion consist
of a hierarchy of discourses, some of tem elaborately theoretcal (schol
astcism), some etical and prescriptive. others exhortatory and consolatory
(preaching, popular piety); and the insttution of the church ensures that
each of these discourses meshes constantly with the oters, to create an
unbroken contnuum between the theoretcal and the behaviourl.
It is sometmes claimed that if idelogies are acton-riented sets of
beliefs, then this is one reason for their false, partial or distorting nature. A
connection can be made here, in other words. between te 'sociologcal'
character of ideology - the fact that it concers ideas geared fairly directly to
soial practce - and the epistemological issue of these ideas' falsity. On this
viewpoint, a te cogntion of the world buckles under the pressure of
certain pragmatc interests, or is warped by the limts of the U situaton
from which it springs. To say that the language of bourgeois politcal
50
ieologcal Strate
g
e
economy is ideological is to claim that at certain key points it betrays an
'interference' from the insistence of practical bourgeois interests. It need not
be just a 'hgher' encodement of those interests, as Mar himself appreciated;
it i not just some spurious theoretcal refection of bourgeois behavioural
ideology. But at certain points its genuinely cogntve discourse becomes
blocked, forced up against certain conceptual limits whch mark the real
historcal fronters of bourgeois society itsel And these theoretical
problems could then only be resolved by a transformaton of that form of
life.
Ideology, on ths view, is thought rendered false by its social determin
ations. The trouble with this formulation, of course, is that there is no
thought which is not socially determined. So it must be a queston of the kind of
soial determinants under consideration. There is no need to hold tat te only
alteratve to ideology is then some 'non-perpectval', socially disinterested
knowledge; you can simply argue that at any given hstorcal point certain
soially determined standpoint will yeld more of the truth than others.
Someone, as tey say, may be 'in a position to know', while oters may not
be. The fact that all viewpoints are socially determined does not entail that
all viewpoints ar equal in value. A prisoner is more likely to recognize the
oppressive nature of a partcular juridical system than a judge. Interests may
interfere wth our knowledge, in te sense, for example, that to undertand
the siration tuly may not be in my interests. But someone else may risk
staring to death unless they do get to understand the real situaton, in which
case teir knowledge is by no means disinterested.
An ideology may be seen not simply as 'expressing' social interests but as
rationalizing them. Those who believe that there will be no air left to breathe in
Britain if we allow more immigration are probably rationaliing a racist atti
tude. Rtonalizaton is at root a psychoanalytic categor, defned by J.
Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis as a 'procedure whereby the subject attempts to
present an explanation that is either logically consistent or ethically accept
able for atrudes, ideas, feelngs, etc., whose tue motives are not perceived'.JI
To call ideologes 'rtonalizing' is already to imply that there is somethng
discreditable about them - that they mto defend the indefensible, cloaking
some disreputable motive in hgh-sounding ethcal terms.
Not all ideological discourse need be of this kind, however, either because
a group may not regard it own motives as particularly shameful, or because
in fact they are not. Ancient society did not consider slave-ownng to be
.1
Ideolog
reprehensible, and saw no need to ratonalize it a we would need to now.
Exteme rght-wingers see no need to justf the free market by claiming
that it will fnally beneft everyone; for them, the weakest can simply go to
te wall. If what te Diggers and Sufragettes held can be described as
ideological, it i not because it betays concealed and dubious motves.
Ruling groups and classes may have some good motves and some shady
ones: Wester anti-Communism is often enough a self-intereted apologia
for Western propert rght, but sometimes a genuine protest against the
repressiveness of the post-capitalist socetes. Fr psychoanalytc theory, te
true motve in the act of ratonalizaton is necessarily concealed from the
subject since did she but know it she would seek to change it but this may
or may not be so in the case of ideology. Some Americans really do believe
that throwing their military weight around is in te interests of global
freedom, whereas others perceive more cynically that it is i the interest of
protectng American property. Ruling classes are not always self-deluded,
not always utter dupe of their own propaganda.
On this view, ten, ideologies can be seen as more or less systematc
attempts to provide plausible explanatons and justfcations for social
behaviour whic might oterwise be the object of critcism. These apologias
ten conceal the tt from others, and perhaps also from the ratong
subject itelf If all social interest are viewed in the manner of the sociologist
Paeto as largey afectve and irratonal, then all theoretical ideology
becomes a knd of elaborate ratonalizaton, substtutng supposedly ratonal
belief for irrational or arational emotions and opinions. The structre of
ratonalizaton i thus metaphorical: one set of conceptons stands in for
anoter.
Oppressed groups in society may ratonalize just as thoroughy as their
rlers. They may perceive that teir conditions leave a lot to be desired, but
ratonalize this fact on the grounds tat they desere to sufer, or that
everyone else does too, or that it usomehow inevitable, or that the alterna
tve might be a good deal worse. Since these atttudes will generlly beneft
te rulers, it might be claimed that ruling classes sometimes allow those they
subjugate to do much of teir ratonalizing for them. Dominated groups or
classes c also ratonalize their sitation to te point of self-deception,
persuading themselve that they are not unappy at all. It is worth notng
here that if we discovered that they really were happy, it is hard to know why
we should press for teir conditions to be changed; we would have to hold
instead tat they were not in fact happy but were for ideological reasons
52
Ielogical Stratie
unaware of t. If it is in one sense clearly not in te intrest of an
oppresed group to deceive itself about it situaton. there is another snse in
which it often u since such self-ecepton may render it conditons more
tolerable. It is not siply a mater of the group's belief being at odds here
with it interet, but of it having confict kds of intrets
Ratonaliaton may help to promote interest, but tere are ways of
promotg interest which do not partcularly involve ratonalaton. One
may help to promote one's interest precsely by nt ratonaing tem, as in
the case of a self-onfessed hedonist who w our sympate by h
disarmi candour. A stoical or fatalitc ideology may raton the
wretched conditons of some social group, but it need not necessarily
advance it interest, other tan i te sense of supplyin it wit an opiate.
A excepton to t case is Nietsche's celebrated doctine of res etimet
whereby a downtrodden people deliberately inect teir rulers wit the
own self-atgat nilism and so cun ly curtl teir power.
The mechanism .of rtonaaton is usually tought to be at the root of
self-ecepton. on whic tere is now a rc sugestve litertre,12 Sl
decepton is te conditon in whic one h want or deires whc one
denes or disavows, or of whic one is simply unawae. Denys Turer fnds
tis whole concepton deeply problematcal on two grounds: frt, because it
would seem t deny the reality of te state of self-ecepton. The self
deceived person really is self-deceived, rter t harbouring some
autentc desire overlaid ,y a layer of false conscousness. Secondly, Turner
can m no real sense of te idea of having a deire of which one is
unaware, or which one systemtcally misiterpret to onesell3 Te
problem here may tm partly on the knds of want and desires in queston.
It would seem reasonable to argue that an exploited social group may be
profoundly dissatsfed with te regie which proft fom it, wthout fully
acknowledging ts in a conscious way. It may show up instead in the form
of a 'performarve contradicton' between what the members of te group do
and what tey my tey may ofcially accord loyalty to te regime whle
demonstrating teir indiference to it by, say, massive absenteeism from
work Where tose who queston te concept of self-decepton are surely
rght is that it would not make sense to say tat t goup had a burning
deie to socialie industy under workers' contol, dismntle the stuctures
of patiarcy and withdrw fom NAT in four months' rme, and not be
aware of it. Nobody can entertn aspiraton as precise as that and stll be
unconscious of them, just as a dog may be vaguely expectg it master's
53
Ideolog
return, but cannot be expectng him to retur at 2.15 pm on Wednesday.
Ideas and beliefs may spring from underlying desires, but the are also
pdy constttve of them. A member of some 'lost' tribe in the Amaon
basin cannot desire to be a brain surgeon, since he has no such concept.
Rtonaliaton involves a confict beteen conscious belief and unconscious
or unavowed motvaton, but there are problems i regarding ideology in
general as a question of repression in the Freudian sense. To be mysted is
les to have repressed some piece of knowledge than not to have known
someting in the frt place. There is also the question of whether ideology
sometmes involves holding mutually contadictory idea at the sme time,
as opposed to being caught in a contadicton beteen conscious belief and
unconscious atttde. It is hard to see how someone could declare that
children were in all respects delightul and denounce them in the very next
breath as repulsive little beasts, a opposed to observg that children were
deligtul in some ways but not in others. But a manerant might swing
wth suc bewildering rapidity beteen admiring his master and betraying
withering contempt for him that we might conclude that he held, in efect,
to mutally contadictory belefs at one and the same tme. The admra
ton no doubt belongs to m'ofcial' ideology, whereas the contempt arises
from his 'practcal consciousness'. When Othello declares that he believes
Desdemona to be fithful to m and yet doe not believe it he may not
mean that he sometmes thn the one ting and sometme te other, or
ct part of him tusts in her and part does not, or that he really hasn't a clue
what he beleves and is totally consed. He may mean chat at one level he
fmds it unerly inconceivable that she ha betayed him, while at another
level he h ample evidence to suggest cat she has. One aspect dfOthello's
patriarchal ideology - his complacent faith in his security of sexual posse
sion - is in deadlock with another his paranoid suspicion of women.
Te concept of ratonlizaton is closely allied to that of legitimation Legit
imaton refers to the proces by whic a ruling power comes to secure fom
it subject an at least tacit conent to its authority, and like 'ratonalizaton'
it can have something of a peoratve smack about it, suggesting the need to
make repectble otherwise ilict interests. But dneed not always be so:
legitmaton can simply mean establishing one's intrests as broadly accept
able, rather than lending tem a spurious wash oflegality. Social interests we
regard a just and valid may have to fght hard to w credibility fom
soiety as a whole. To legtte one's power i not necessarily to 'nate'
>1
Ideological Strate
it, in the sense of maki
ng it apper spontaneous and inevitable to one's
subordinates: a group or class may well perceive that there could be kinds of
authority qther than that of their masters, but endorse this authority even so.
A mode of dominaton is generally legitimated when those subjected to it
come to judge their oW behaviour by the crteria of their rulers. Someone
with a Liverpool accent who believes he speaks icorrectly ha legitmated
an established cultural power.
There is a signifcant distnction beteen ideas which sere and whic
help to legitimat social interests. A dominant class may promote its ends by
preaching that most of its underlings are of subhuman intelligence, but this
is hardly likely to legitmate it in the eyes of its subject. Te belief that the
highest spiritual value is to put one over on one's competitors would
probably need to be ratonalized to secure legitmacy for itel Many of the
beliefs of an oppressed group - that their suferings are unavoidable, or that
rebellion will be brutally punished - sere the interests of their masters, but
do not particularly legitmate them. The absence of certain beliefs may sere
one's own interest, or those of anoter group: it aids the bourgeoisie that
tey do not hold that the upshot of cuttng wages is eteral torment, just as
it helps them if tose whose wages are cut reject the doctrines of dialectical
materialsm. A set of false beliefs may furter a class's interest, as Mar
argues of middle-class revolutonaries in The 18th Brumaire ofLouis Bonapare,
who delude themselves productvely about the splendour of their project.
Just as tue idea may prove dysfunctonal for advancing social interest, so
false ones may prove functional for icindeed for Friedrich Nietsche trut i
just any illusion which turns out to be life-enncing. A group, for example.
may overestmate its own politcal stengt, but the fuit of ths miscalcula
tion may be some successful course of action it would not otherwise have
embarked on. A far as ruling classes go, the illusion that they are actng in
the common interest may buttress their self-esteem and thus, along with it,
their power. Note also that a belief may be elicable in terms of one's social
positon, but may not signifcantly advance it and that to claim tht a belief
is functonal for social interests is not necessarily to deny that it is ratonally
grounded. The holder of te belief may have arrived at it anyway, despite the
fact that it is in hs or her interests to do SO.14
It is sometmes thought that some actions of the state are legitmate,
whereas others are not. The state has licit powers, but occaionally kick over
the traces. For a Marst, however, the bourgeois state is illegitmate in se,
however it may succeed in legitmating itself in te eyes of its subordinates,
55
Ideolog
since it is essentally an organ of unjustfable class rule. We should
remember. however, tat suc legitimaton is never simply an ideological
af ar ruling classes have material means at their disposal for elicitng the
consent of teir subordinates, such as raising their wages or providing them
with free healt care. Ad as we saw in discussing Th Dominant Ieolog
Tei it is rash to suppose tat a legitmated power is always one succes
fully interized by those who are its target. We need to distnguish
beteen such 'normatve' acceptance, and what is probably te more
widespread condition of , pragmatc' acceptnce. in whc subalter groups
endorse the right of their rulers to gover because they c see no realstc
altertve.
A importnt device by which an ideology acieves legitimacy is by
universalizing and 'eternalizing' itsel Values and interests whch are in fct
specifc to a certain place and time are projected as the values and interest
of all humanity. The assumpton is that if tis were not so, the sectoral, self
interested nature of the ideology would 100m too embarrassingly large. and
so would impede its general acceptance.
The locus classicus of this view can be found in Te Geran Ieolog where
%and Engels argue tat 'each new class whic puts itself in the place of
one ruling before it. is compelled. merely in order to carry through it aim,
to represent its interest as the common interest of all the. members of society.
that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give it ideas the form of univer
sality, and represent them as the only ratonal, universally valid ones,' I5 We
should not dismiss such universaliaton as < mere sleight of hand: Ma and
Engels go on instantly in ts passage to remark that the interests of an
emergent revolutonary class really are likely to be connected to the
common interest of all other non-ruling classes. The revolutonary pro
letarat has traditonally sought to rally to its banner other disaffected groups
and classes: poor peasants, intellectuals, element of the petty bourgeoisie
and so on, who have their own interests in toppling the rling bloc. And
radical popular movement of one kind or another have taditonally clung
to the shirt-tails of the revolutonary bourgeoisie, only, typically, to be sold
out once that class massumed power. When a social class is stll emergent,
it has had as yet scant tme to consolidate it own sectonal interest, and
bends its energies instead to winng as broad support as possible. Once
ensconced in power, it selfsh interests w tend to become more obvious,
causing it to lapse from universal to partcular status in the eyes of some
56
Ideologcal Statge
ersthile supporters. For some Marst theorist, it is ony at dpoit that
ideology proper takes hold: on tis view, clas conciousness i not ideo
logical when a class is stll in i
ts revolutonary phase, but becomes so when it
needs later to conceal contadictons beteen its own interest and those of
soiety as a whole.16 A false universalizaton, in shor, become necesary
once a tue one ha failed.
Universaaton, then, is , not always a specously ratonalii
mechnism It is indeed ultmately in the interests of al individuals that
women should emancipate temselve; and te belief that one's value are
fnally universal may provide some signfcant impetus in gaining legitmacy
for teQ. If a soial group or class needs to universalize it belief and value
to wsupport for them, then this wmae a diference to the belief and
values in queston. It is not just a matter of tat class persuadin others that
its interest are in fact at one with teirs, but of fming tese interests i te
frst place in ways which make this plausible. It is a queston, in oter words,
of how the group or class decribe itself to itsel not just of how it sells itself
to oters. Frming one's interest in t style may r againt one's im
mediate interest, or even against one's longer-ter ones. The univeral
values of te reolutonary bourgeoisie - freedom, justce, equality and S on
- at once promoted it own cause and occasioned it grave embarassment
when other subordinated classe began to take tee impertve serously.
If I am to convince you tat it i really in your interets for me to b self
interested, then I can only be efectvely self-intereted by becoming les so.
If my interests have to take your into account in order to fourish. then they
wbe redefned on the basis of your own needs, tus ceasin to b identcal
wit themselve. But your interests w not remai self-identcal either.
since tey have now been reworked as achievable ony within the matx of
mne. A useful example of ts proes i the politcal state. The stte for
Marism i fundamentally.an instment of ruling-class power but it is also
an organ by which tat clas must fashion the general consensus within
which its own interets might best thrive. This latter requirement then typi
cally involve te ruling bloc in negotatng wit antagonstc force within
te arena of the state in ways which are not always compatble wit it own
short-term interests.
A class which succeeds in universalizing its w cease to appear as a
sectonal interest at ,at the acme of its power, tat power wll efectvely
vanish. It is for ts reason that 'universalizaton' i commony a pejoratve
term for radicals. On this view, ideologies are always driven by global
57
. Ueolog
ambitons, suppressing te historcal relatvity of teir own doctnes.
'Ideolo', announces Louis Altusser, 'has no outside.')7 This global reach
encompasses rme as wel as space. A ideology i reluctant to believe that it
was ever bom, since to do so is to acknowledge that it can die. Lie the
oedipal chd, it would prefer to mof itself as without parentage, sprung
parthenogenetcally from its own seed. It is equally embarrassed by the
presence of sibling ideologies, since these mark out its own fnite frontiers
and so delimit its sway. To view an ideology from the outside is to recogne
it limts; but fom the inside these boundaries vansh into innty, leaving
te ideology cured back upon itselflike cosmic space.
It is not clear, however, that all ideological discourse needs to conceal its
fronters in this way. 'I know I speak as a Wester liberal, but I just do believe
that Islam is a barbaric creed': such coyly self-referential pronouncements
should alert us against the now fashionable belief that for the subject to
reckon hmself into his own utterances i inevitably a progressive move. On
the contary, as with the disarming candour of the self-declared hedonst, it
might actually lend convicton to his viewpoint. Now all ideologists
obtusely insist that everyone from Adam to the Chief Druid has shared their
opinions -which brings us to the doctrine of 'naturalization'.
Successful ideologies are often thought to render teir beliefs natural and
self-evident - to identf them with the 'common sense' of a society so that
nobody could imagine how they mght ever be different. This process,
whch Perre Bourdieu calls dox, involves the ideology in creatng as tght a
ft as possible between itelf and social realty, thereby closing the gap into
whic the leverage of critique could be inserted. Social reality is redefned by
the ideology to become coextensive with itself in a way which occludes the
truth that the reality in fact generated the ideology. Instead, the to appear
to be spontaneously bred together, as indissociable as a sleeve and its linng.
The reult, politcally speaking. is an apparently vicious circle: the ideology
could only be transformed if the reality was such as to allow it to become
objectfed; but the ideolo processes the reality in ways which forestall ts
possibilty. The two are tus mutually self-conrmng. On ts view, a
ruling ideology does not so much combat alternatve ideas as thrust them
beyond the very bounds of the thinkable. Ideologies exist because there are
thngs which must at all costs not be thought, let alone spoken. How we
could ever know that there were such thoughts is then an obvious logical
difculty. Perhaps we just feel that there is something we ought to be
58
Ieological Stratgie
tnkng, but we have no idea what it is.
Ideology. on this vc,ofers itself as an 'Of courser', or That goes wthout
saying'; and from Georg Lukacs to Roland Barches ths has fgured as a
cental assumpton of 'ideology critique'. Ideology freezes history into a
'second nature', presentng it a spontaneous, inevitable and so unalterable. It
uessentally a reication of social life, as Mar would seem to argue in h
famous essay on te fetishism of commodities. Naruralizing has an obvious
link wth universalizing, since what is felt to be unversal is often thought to
be narural; but te two are not in fact synonymous, since one could regard
some actvity as unversal wthout necessarily judging it to be natural. You
might concede that all human societies to date have displayed aggression,
whle looking eagerly to a future order in whch tis would no longer be so.
But there is clearly a strong implication that what has been true always and
everywhere is innate to human narre, and so cannot be changed. One just
mto accept that twelfth-cenrury Frenc peasant were really capitalists in
heavy disguise. or that the Sioux have always secretly wanted to be stock
brokers.
Like unversalizaton, naruralizaron is part of te dehistordzing thrust of
ideology, its tacit denial that ideas and beliefs are specifc to a particular
rime, place and social group. A Marx and Engels recognize in The Genan
Ideolog to conceive of fons of consciousness as autonomous, magically
absolved from social determnants, is to uncouple them from hstor and so
convert them into a natural phenomenon. !t some feudalist ideologues
denounced early capitalist enterprise, it was because they regarded it as
unnatural - meaning, of course, untrue to feudal defniton of human
nature. Later on, capitalism would return the compliment to socialism. It is
interestng, incidentally, thac te concept of naruralizaton itelf rests upon a
partcular ideolog of Narure, whch takes it in te manner of William
Wordsworth to be massively immutable and enduring; and it is ironic that
ths view of Nature should prevail in an historical epoch where the srf is
contnually being hacked into human shape, technologically dominanted
and transformed. Thomas Hardy opens The Retur ofthe Native by speaking
of the barren, uncanging landscape of Egdon heath, a tact of land whc
wa planted from end to end by the Forestry Commission not long after his
deat Perhaps it is human narure which the ideologists have in mind, which
i simiarly assumed co be immutable. To deny ths, a the politcal left
properly does, is not to assert that there is nothng whatsoever about the
human species which is narural and unchanging. It is natural that human
59
Ideolog
beings should be bor, eat, engage in sexual actvty, associate wt one
another, transform their environments, die and so on; and the fact tt all of
these practces are, culturally speakin, highly variable is no rebuttal of their
naturalness. Kr Mar believed stongly in a human nature, and was surely
quite right to do SO.18 Tere are many crucial aspects of human societe
which follow from the material nature of our bodie. a nature whic has
altered only negligibly in the history of the race. Appeals to nature and the
natural are by no mears necessarily reactonary a socal order which denie
warmth, nourishment and shelter to its members is unnatural, and should
b politcally challenged on these grounds. Wen the rulers of the ane
regme in eighteenth-century Europe heard the dread word 'nature', they
reached for their weapons.
Many forms of ideology do indeed naturalze their own values; but as
wit universalizaton one may take leave to doubt whether ths is unversally
true. The case tat ideology converts the contoversial into the obvious h
itself become so obvious tt it is ripe for interrogatng. The well-named
doctrine of the Assumpton of the Blessed Virgin into heaven is certainly
ideological, but it is hardly obvious even to many of its pious adherents. It is
hard to imagine it springing spontaneously fom our caual experience of
the world. Many people revere the monarchy; but it is not always self
evident to them that tere mut be a monarch, and the may be well aware
that there are societies in reasonable working order which lack such an
instituton. Someone may be ferociously committed to capitalism in the
perfect knowledge that it u a fairly recent hstorical system one way of
organizing society among many.
The supposed obviousness of ideology goes along with its presumed lack
of self-refexiveness. Te assumpton here is that it would be impossible for
somebody to hold ideological views and be simultaneously aware tt they
were ideological. Ideologies are discourses unable to cure back critcaly
upon themselves, blinded to their own grounds and fronters. If ideology
kew itself to be such it would instantly cease to be so,just as if a pig knew it
was a pig it would not be. 'Ideology', obseres Louis Althusser. 'never says: "1
am ideological".'19 Though tis may be true much of the tme, that 'never' is
surely an overstatement. 'I know I'm a terrible sexst, but I just can't stand the
sight of a woman in tousers'; 'Sorry to be so bourgeois, but would you mind
spitting in the sink rather than in the food mixer?': suc utterances may b
little more tan attempts to forestall critcsm by their arch frankess, but
they indicate a limited degree of ironic self-awareness which a full-bloded
60
Ideolo
g
ical Stat
g
ie
'naturton' teory fais to take into account I may have some concous
ness of the social origin and functon of my belefs, without on that score
ceasing to hold them. A novelist like E.M. Frster is perfectly capable of
discernng something of te exploitatve conditons on which his own
liberal hum rest, without thereby ceasing to be a liberal humanist
Indeed a guilt-sticken insight into the sources of his own privilege is par of
his mddle-class liberalism; a true liberal must be liberl enough to suspect
his own lberalism. Ideology, in short, is not always te utterly self-blinded,
self-deluded staw target it theorist ocasionally make it out to be - not
least in te cc, itey regressive sel-ironizing of a postodemst
age. On te contary, it can rise from tme to tme to 'metalinguistic' status
and name itself at least partally, witout abandoning its positon. And such
partal self-refectveness may tghten rater tan loosen its grip. That
ideologies should be tought always naturalizing and universal natural
ies and universalizes the concept of ideology, and gives its antagonsts too
eay a poltcal ride.
Finally, we may ask how far the various mechanisms we have examned
are displayed by oppositonal ideologies as well as by domnant ones.
Oppositonal ideologies often seek to u a divere aray of poltcal forces,
and are geared to effectve action; tey also strive to legitmate teir beliefs
in te eyes of socety as a whole, so that some socialist, for example, speak of
the need to create a 'socialist common sense' in the consciousness of
ordinary men and women. When the mddle class wa stl an emergent
politcal force, its revolutonary rallyng cry of liberty wa certainly, among
oter, fner tings, a ratonalzation of the freedom to exploit and it was
intent on both universalizing it values (appealng to a abstact 'md'
against te parochialism of the traditonal order), and nati them
(invoking 'ntr right' as against mere custom and privilege). Poltcal
radicals today are properly wary of repeating ths gesture, and would of
coure reject the view that their belefs merely ratonalze some specious
ulterior motve; but they are implcitly commtted to unversalizing their
values, in that it would make no sense to argue that sociast femnism w
appropriate for Calfornia bur not for Cambodia. Those on te politcal left
who feel nervous of such grndly global gestures, fearing that they
necessarily implicate some oppressively abstact noron of 'M', are simply
liberal pluralist or cultural relatvst in radical clothing.
.
61
3
FROM T H E
E NL IGH T E NME N T TO T H E
I N T E R NA T I ONA L S E COND
THR is a peculiar feature about words whch end in 'ology': '-ology' means
the science or study of some phenomenon; but by a curious process of
inversion 'ology' words often end up meaning the phenomenon studied
rather than the systematic knowledge of it. Thus 'methodology' means the
study qf metho, but i commony used nowadays to mean method itsel To
say you are examining Ma Weber's methodology probably means you are
considering the methods he uses, rather than his ideas about them. To say
that human biology is not adapted to large doses of carbon monoxide means
that our bodies are not so adapted, not the study of them. 'The geology of
Peru' can refer to the physical features of that country as much as to the
scientfc examination of them. And the American tourist who remarked to
a friend of mne on the 'wonderful ecology' of the West of Ireland just
meant that the scenery was beautfl.
Such an inversion befell the word ideology not long after its birth.
'Ideology' originally meant the scentifc study of human ideas; but fairly
soon the object took over from the approach, and the word rapidly came to
mean systems of ideas themselves. An ideologist was then less someone who
analysed ideas tn someone who expounded them. It is interesting to
speculate on at least one of the ways i which ts reversal came about. An
ideologist, a we shall see in a moment, was initally a phlosopher intent on
revealig the material bis of our thought. Te last th he believed was
63
Ieolo
tat ideas were mysterious things in themselves, quite independent of
external conditionng. 'Ideology' was an attempt to put ideas back in their
place, as the products of certain mental and physiological laws. But to carry
through tis project meant lavishing a good deal of attention on the realm of
human consciousness; and it is then understandable, if ironic, that such
theorists should be taken to believe that ideas were all there was. It i a
tough one should tg as a 'religious phiosopher' some agnostc rationalist
who spent a lifetme deep in mystcism and mythology for the purpose of
demonstratn that thee were illusions bred by certin social conditons. In
fact te early French ideologues did believe that ideas were at the root of
social life, so that to accuse them of infating the importance of human
consciousness is not simply a mistke; but if they were idealist in this sense,
they were materialists in their view of where ideas actually derived from.
Ideology in our own rme h sometmes been sharply counterposed to
science; so it is ironic to recall that ideology began life precisely a science,
as a rational enquiry into the laws governg the formaton and develop
ment of ideas. Its root lie deep in the Enlightenment dream of a world
entrely transparent to reason free of the prejudice, superstiton and
obscurantsm of the ancen regime. To be an 'ideologist' - a clincal analyst of
the nature of consciousness - was co be a critic of 'ideology', in the sense of
the dogatc, irratonal belief systems of traditonal society. But this critique
of ideology was in fact an ideology all of itsel and this in two diferent
senses. For one tng, the early ideologues of the French eighteenth century
drew heavily on John Locke's empiricist philosophy in their war against
metaphysics, insistng that human ideas were derived from sensatons rather
than from some innate or transcendentl source; and such empiricism, with
its image of individuals as passive and discrete, is itelf deeply bound up with
bourgeois ideological assumptons. For another thing, the appeal to a
disinterested nature, science and reason, as opposed to religion, traiton and
political auchority, simply masked the power interests which these noble
noton secretly served. We might risk the paradox. then, that ideology was
bor as a thoroughy ideological critque of ideology. In illuminatng the
obscurantsm of the old order, it cast upon society a dazzling light whch
blinded men and women to the murky sources of tis clarity.
The of the Enlightenment ideologues, as spokesmen for the
revolutionary bourgeoisie of eighteenth-century Europe, was to reconstuct
society from the ground up on a ratonal basis. They inveighed fearlessly
against a social order which fed the people on religious superstton i order
64
From Enlightmet t Scond Inttional
to butes it ow brtally absolutst power, and dreamt of a fture in whic
the dignity of men and women, as cretures able to surive without opiate
and illusion, would be cherished. Their cae, howee, contined one
crippling contradicton. For i tey hed on te one hand tt individuals
were the determned products of their environent tey insited on the
other hand tt tey could mabove such lowly detert by the power
of educaton. Once the laws of human conciousnes were laid bare to
scientc inspecton, chat consciousness could b tansformed in the
directon of human happiness by a sytematc pedagogica project. But what
would b the determinants of that project? Or, as Karl Ma put it who
would educate the educators? If all concousnes is materally conditoned,
must not this apply also to the apparenty fee, disintereted notons which
would enghten the ms out of autocrcy into freedom? If ever is
to b exposed to the pellucid light of reaon must not d include reson
itself?
Te ideologues could ofer no soluton to this quanda but they
perevered nonetheless in ther pursuit of the esence of md and
political instttons must b recued fom the say of metaphysica
delusion; but is not this project fatally incomplete mcit etends itself to
the most distnctive aspect of humanit, consciousnes itelf? How can a
rtonal society b constcted i the mind itelf: supposedly the very basis of
soia existence, remain icrutable and elusive? Te proramme of an
'ideology' is accordingly to bring t most complex, impalpable of
phenomena witn te province of scientfc reearch, in a way scndaous to
the metaphysical dualist for whom mnd is one tng and materiality quite
another. The new science of ideology wa thu as subversive in it day as
psychoanalyis in our ow te i even the soul or psyche could b shown to
work by certain determinate mechansms, then the last baston of mystery
and tanscendence in a mechanstc world would b fl y toppled.
Ideology is revolutionary ste at the priest and kings. at the taditonl
custoians and teccans of the 'inner life'. Kowledge of humanty is
wested from te monopoly of a rling class and invested instead in an elite
of scientc theorist.!
That scientc reson should penette to the inost recese of the
hu psyche is not only theoretcaly logca but poltcally esenta. For
soial intttons c b ratonl y tansforme ony on the bais of the most
ect kowledge of human nature; ad justce and happines le i te adapt
ato_n of such insttutons to these unc laws, rater t i the
65
Ideolog
abitary forcing of human nature into 'artfcial' socal forms. Ideology. in
short. belongs with a fl-blooded programme of social eneerng, which
will remake our social environment. thus alter our sensatons. and so change
our ideas. Such is te well-meanng fanty of the great Ehtenment
ideologist, of Holbac. Condilac. Helvetus. Joseph Priestley. William
w ad the younger Samuel Colerdge, that a diect line could be
taced fom the material conditions of human beings to their senory
eperience and then to their thought. and tht this whole tajector could
be diverted by radical reform towards the goal of spirtal progress and
ultmate perfecton.2 Ideology. whch i the hands of Mr and Engels w
shorty come to denot the illusion tht ideas are somehow autonomous of
te material world. strt life as exactly the reverse: as one branch of a
mechanical materialism whic clings to the faith tat the operatons of the
mnd are as predictable as the laws of gravity. This science of ideas. as the
inventor of the term ideology Destutt de Tracy commented. is a part of
zoology, one region within a more general science of the human animal.
The career of Antoine Destutt de Tracy is a fascinatng. strangely unsung
stor.3 Bor an aristorat he deserted his own class to become one of the
most combative spokesmen of the revolutionary Frenc bourgeoisie. He is
thus a classic case of what we shall see later a the Gramscian transiton from
'taditonal' to 'organic' intellectual. He fought a a soldier durng the French
revoluton and was imprisoned during the Terror; in fact he frst hatched the
concept of a science of ideas in hs prison cell. The noton of ideology was
thus brought to birth in thoroughly ideological conditions: ideology
belonged to a ratonal politcs. in contrast to the irrationalist barbarsm of
the Terror. If men and women were tuly to gover themselves, then the laws
of their nature must frst be patiently scrutinized. What was needed. Tracy
declared. was a 'Newton of the science of thought', and he himself was a
dear candidate for the post. Since all science rests upon ideas. ideology
would oust theology as the queen of them all, guaranteeing their unity. It
would reconstruct politcs, economics and ethics from the ground up,
moving from the simplet processes of sensaton to the loftiest regions of
spirit. Prvate property, for example. is based upon a distncton beteen
'yours' and 'mne'. which can be trcked in tur to a fundamental perceptual
oppositon between 'you' and 'me'.
With the revolution still at it height, Tracy became a prominent
member of the Intitut Nationale, the elite goup of scientist and phlo
sophers who consttuted the theoretcal wing of the social reconstucton of
66
From Enlightnment to Second Intmational
France. He worked in the Insttute's Moral and Political Sciences division, in
the Secton of Analysis of Sensatons and Ideas, and wa engaged in creating
for the eoles een,trale of the civil service a new programme of natonal educa
ton which would take the science of ideas as it basis. Napoleon was at first
delighted by the Inttute, proud to be an honorary member, and invited
Tracy to join him a a soldier in his Egyptian campaign. (perhaps this was a
calculated backhanded compliment. since a move from savant to soldier
would surely have been somewhat regressive.)
Tracy's fortunes, however, were soon on the wane. A Napoleon began to
renege on revolutonary idealism, the ideologues rapidly became his bite noir
and the concept of ideology itself entered the feld of ideological stugle. It
stood now for politcal liberalism and republicanism, in confict with
Bonapartst authoritarianism. Napoleon claimed to have invented the
derogatory term 'ideologue' himself as a way of demoting the men of the
Insttute fom scientsts and savant to sectarians and subversives. Tracy and
his kind, so he complained, were 'windbags' and dreamers - a dangerous
class of men who struck at the root of politcal autority and brutally
deprived men and women of their consolatory fctons. 'You ideologues', he
grumbled, 'destroy all illusions, and the age of illusions is for individuals as
for peoples the age of happinesss.4 Before long he was seein ideologues
under every bed. and even blamed them for his defeat in Russia. He closed
down the Moral and Political Sciences secton of the Intitut Nationale in
1802, and its members were assigned instead to teach history and poetry.
One year before, Tracy had begun publishing his Projet d'iliment d'iiologie,
in what can only have been a calculated act of defance of the new milieu of
religiose reacton. The contnuaton of the ttle of his work reads: 'o I'uage de
iole eentrales de la Ripublique' - a clear enough indication of its practical.
polirical character, its role within what Althusser would later call the
'ideological state apparatuses'. 'Ideology' is simply te teoretcal expression
of a perasive stategy of social reconstucton, in which Tracy hmself was a
key functonary. His fght to retain ideology in the eole eentrale failed,
however, and it was replaced as a discipline by military instucton.
In 18121 in the wake of hs Russian debacle, Napoleon rounded upon the
ideologues in a now celebrated speech:
It is to the doctine of the ideologues - to this difuse metaphysics. which in a
contrived manner seek to find the primar cause and on this foundaton
would eret the leislaton of people, intead of adaptng the laws to a
67
Ideolog
knowled
g
e of the human her and of te les on of hsto
r
- to which
one must attbute H the misfortune whch hve befUen our bloved
France.S
In a notable irony, Napoleon contemptuously braets the ideologues wth
the very metaphysican they were out to discredit. That there is some tuth
in hs accusaton is surely clear: Tracy and his colleagues, tue to their raton
alist creed, ascribed a foundational role to ideas msocial life, and thought a
politcs could be deduced fom a priori principles. Bthey waged war on the
metaphysical idealism whc viewed ideas as spiritual enttes, they were at
one with its belief that ideas were the basis upon whch all else eted. But
Napoleon's irrtaton strikes a note whic was to resound throughout the
modem period: the impatence of the politcal pragmatst with the radical
intellectal, who would dare to theore the social formation as a whole. It is
the quarrel in our own time beteen neo-pragmatsts suc as Stanley Fish
and Rchard Rotty - unlikely candidates, otherwse, for Napoleon - and the
politcal left. Te ideologues' comtent to a 'global' analysis of society is
inseparable fom teir revolutionary politcs, and at loggerheads with
Bonaparte's mystfcatory talk of the 'human heart'. In oter terms, it is the
eteral enty beteen humanist and social scientist - an early intance of
Roland Bartes's dictm that 'System is the enemy of "Man".' If Napoleon
denounces the ideologues it is because they are the sworn foes of ideology,
intent on demysc the sentmental illusions and maundering religiosity
with whc he hoped to legitmate hs dictatorial rule.
In te teeth of Bonaparte's displeasure, Tracy contnued work on a second
volume of hs Element and snatched tme to work on a Grammar Hs
approach to language was too abstract and analytic for Napoleon's taste,
enraging the latter stll further: Tracy inisted on raising questons of te
origins and functions of language, whle Napoleon favoured the study of
language through te teacng of the Frenc literary classics. Once more,
'theorist' and 'humanist' were locked in combat, in a philological dispute
which encoded a politcal antgonism beteen radical and reactonary.
Suspected of involvement in a plot to assassinate the Emperor, Tracy
opposed him as a senator and produced te molume of his life's work,
devoted to te science of economics. Like Mr he believed tat economic
interests were the fnal determinants of social life; but he fnds in these
interests a recalcitance whch threatens to undermine his ratonalist politcs.
What use is reason, he complain, in persuading the idle ric that tey are
68
From Enlihtnment t Scond Inttionl
go for nothig? (racy was hielf one of Frnce's larget landed propre
tors, and an absentee landlord at tat). The fnl volume of the Eleet tus
preses up againt a materal limit which it w be left to M to cros; and
the tone of its Conclusion i accordigly defeatst. mtr hs eyes to the
economic realm, Tr mbeen forced to conont te radical 'irratonality'
of soal motvatons in class-soety, te rootenes of thought i selfh
interests. The concept of ideology is begn to stain towads it later,
pejoratve meanng; and Tracy helf acknowledges that reason must tke
more account of feeling, cacter and experence. A mont after fhing
the work, he wrote an arcle defendin suicide.
Late in his life, Tracy published a work on - of all things love, which
was devoured by his adrin disciple StendhaL Tracy spoke up for te
complete freedom of young women to select their own marriage parter,
pleaded te cause of unmarried mothers "nd championed sexual liberty. (His
proto-feminism had its limts, however: women were to be fully educated
but not allowed the vote.) Thomas Jefferson had him elected to te
Amercan Philosophical Society, and Tracy in his cm was deluded enough
to declare the United States 'te hope and example of te world'. When te
French revoluton of 1830 broke out almost literlly on h dorstep, the
elderly Tracy stolled fom his house and te hself on te barrcades
Mar described Desttt de Tracy a a light among te vulgar economist,
though he attacked him in both The Geran Ieolog and Cpit dubbin
m a 'cold-blooded bourgeois-dotinaire' in the latter work. Emmet
Kennedy, in mexcellent study of Trcy, makes te perceptve point that the
only volume of h teatse on ideology that Mar probably read is te one
devoted to economics, and tat te appearance of d work of bourgeois
politcal economy as part of a general science ofideology might have fumed
up in Mar's mind te connecton between te to. In other words, it mght
have helped to shift Marx from his view ofideology as mere abstact ideas to
his sense of it as political apologa.
The emergence of the concept of ideology, ten, is no mere capter in te
histor of ideas. On te contrar, it m the most intmate relaton to
revolutonary struggle, and fgures from the outset as a theoretcal weapon
of- clas warfare. It arrives on the scene inseparable from the material
practces of te ideological state apparatuses, and i itelf as a noton a theate
of contendin ideolocal interests. But if ideology set out to exmne the
sources of human consciousness, what is to be said of the conscousnes
which performs this operaton? Why should that partcular mode of reaon
69
Ideolog
b immune fom its ow propositons about the material foundatons of
thought? Perhaps the whole concept of ideology is just some biologically
determined reflex in the head of a Frenc philosophe called Destutt de Tracy,
wth no more objective validity tan that. Reason would appear able to
monitor te whole of realit; but i it able to monitor itelf Or must it be
the one tg whic falls outide the scope of it own analysis? Te science
of ideas would seem to allot itself transcendental status; but it is exactly such
a claim whic its own doctnes put into question. So it is tat Hegel, in the
Phenomenolog ofSpirt will induce reason to curve back upon itself, tacing
its stately progress towards te Absolute all the way from its humble
germinaton in our routne sense-data
Te kerel of Napoleon's critcism of the ideologues is that.,there is
something irrational about excessive rationalism. In his eyes, tese thinkers
have pressed through their enquiry into the laws of reason to the point
where they have become marooned witn their own sealed system, as
divorced from practcal reality as a psycotc. Sit is that te term ideology
gradually shifts from denotng a sceptcal scientfc materialism to ignifing
a sphere of abstact disconnected ideas; and it is this meaning of the word
whic will then be tken up by Mr and Engels.
Kl Mar's theory of ideology u probably best seen as part of his more
generl theory of alienaton, expounded in the Economic and Philosophical
Manucrpt (1844) and elsewhere.6 In cert social conditons, Margues,
hu powers, product and processes escape from te control of human
subjects and come to assume an apparently autonomous existence. Estanged
in this way fom their agent, suc phenomena then come to exert an
imperious power over them, so that men and women submit to what are in
fact products of their own actvity as though tey are an alien force. The
concept of aenton is thus closely linked to that of 'reifcaton' - for u
soial phenomena cease to be recognizable as the outcome of human
projects, it is understndable to perceive them as material tngs. and thus to
accept their estence as inevitable.
Te theory of ideology embodied in Marx and Engels's Te Geran
Ieolog (1846) belons wth ts general logic of iversion and alienaton. If
human powers and insttutons can undergo ths proces, then so can
consciousnes itel Consciousness is in fact bound up with socal practce;
but for the German' idealist philosophers whom Marx and Engels have in
teir sight, it becomes separated from thee practces. fetshed to a thing-
70
From Enlihtnmet to Second Interational
in-itelf and so, by a process of inversion, can be misunderstood as the very
source and ground of hstorical life. If ideas are grasped as autonomous
entites, then ths helps to natralie and dehistorce tem; and ths for the
early M iSte secret of alideolo
Men are the producers of their conceptions. ideas. etc. - real, actve men,
as they are conditoned by a definite development of their productive
forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these. up to irs furthest
forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence,
and the exstence of men is their actual life-process. If in all idelogy men
and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a 0Ht0 obscura. this
pheomenon arises just as much from their historical life-proess as
, the inversion of objects on the rtina does from their physical life
process.
In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to
earth. here w ascend from earth to heaven. This is to say. we do not set out
from what men say. imagine. conceive, nor from men as narrted. thought
of imagined. conceived, in order to arrive at men in the fesh. We set out
from real. active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we
demonstrate te development of the ideological refexes and echoe of this
life-prcess . . . . Life is not determined by consciousness. but consciousnes by
life.'
Te advance here over the Enlighteent philosophe is plain. For those
thnker, an 'ideology' would help to dispel errors bred by passion, prejudice
and vicious interests. all of which blocked the clear light of reason. Ths
stain of thought passes on to nineteenth-century positvism and to Emile
Durkheim, in whose Rules ofSociological Method (1895) ideology means
among other things allowing preconceptons to tamper wth our knowledge
of real thngs. Sociology is a 'science of facts', and the scientist must accord
igly free himself of the biaes and misconceptons of the layperson in order
to arrive at a properly dispassionate viewpoint. Tese ideological habit and
predispositons, for Durkeim as for te later French philosopher Gaston
Bachelard, are innate to te mind; and this positvist current of social
tought, tue to its Enlghtenment forebears. thus delivers us a pschologitic
theory of ideology. Mr and Engels, by contast, look to the historical
causes and functions of such false consciousness, and so inaugurate the
major modern meaning of the term whose history we are tacing. They
71
Ideolog
arrive at this" ve hard on te heels of Ludwig Peuerbach whose Te Es ece
oGhritianit (1841) sought for the sources of religious illusion in humanit's
actal life conditons, but in a notably dehistoricizing way. Mar and Engels
were not in fact the frst thinkers to see consciousness as socally determined:
i diferent ways, Rousseau, Montesquieu and Condorcet had arrived at ths
view before them.
ideas are at the very source of historical life, it i possible to imagine
that one can cange society by combatting false ideas with tue ones; and it
i this combinaton of ratonalism and idealism whic Mr and Engels are
rejecting. Por them, social illusio are anchored in real contrdictons, so
that ony by the practical actvit of transforming the latter can the former
b abolished. A materialist theory of ideology is thus inseparable from a
revolutionar politcs. Tis, however. involves a paradox. The critque of
ideology claims at once that certain forms of consciousness are false and tat
ts flsit is somehow structral and necessary to a specifc social order. The
falsity of the ideas, we might say, is part of the 'truth' of a whole material
conditon. But the theor which identfes this falsehood therefore under
ct itself at a stroke, exposing a situaton whic simply as a theory it is
powerless to resolve. The critque of ideology, that is to say. i anhe same
moment the critque of the critque of ideology. Moreover, it is not a
though ideology critique proposes to put someting te in place of the
falsit. In one sense, this critque retains something of a ratonalist or En
lgtenment structure: tuth. or theory, will shed light on false conceptons.
But it is ant-ratonalist in so far as what it then proposes is not a set of tue
conceptons, but just the thesis tat all ideas, tue or flse, are grounded in
practcal social actvit, and more partcularly i the contdictons whic
that actvity generates.
More problems then inevitably follow. Does this mean tat true ideas
would be ideas faithful to prctcal social actvity? Or can their tuth or
falsehood be ascertaned independently of this? Are not te illusions of
bourgeois society in some sense actually tue to its practces? If they are
ratonaliatons of contradictons to whic those practices give rse, are not
such misconceptons indeed rooted in the 'real life-process'. rather than idly
autonomous of it? Or is the point that their very autonomy is itself socially
determined? Is this autonomy merely apparent - a mspercepron on te part
of human subject - or is it real? Would true idea be not just tose whic
corresponded to actual prctices, but those which coresponded to 'true'
practces? Ad what would it mean to say of a practice as opposed to a
/2
Frm Enlihtnmet t Secon Inttonal
meaning, mtit was true or fl?
Tere are several difculte with the forulatons in the passage quoted
frm The Geran Ieolo
g
Fr one ting, the whole vocabulary of 'refexes'
and 'ecoes' smacks stongly of mechanical. materialism. What distnguishes
the human animal is that it move in a world of mea and thee
meanings are constitutve of it actvites. not secondary to tem. Ideas are
inter to our social practce. not mere spin-ofs from them. Human
existence, as Ma recognies elsewhere. is purposive or 'intentonal'
existence; and thee purposive concepton form te inner grammar of our
practical life. without whch u would be mere physical moton. The term
'praxis' has been often enough used by the Marxist traditon to captre m
indissolubility of action and signifcance. In general, Mar and Engels
reco dwell enoug but in ter zeal to worst the idealists they rk
ending up here simply invertng tem, retaining a shr dualit beteen
'consciousnes' and 'practcal actvity' but reversing the causal relatons
beteen them Whereas te Young Hegelians whom they are assa
regard ideas as te essence of material life, Mar and Engels just stand tis
oppositon on it head. But the antthesis can always be partly deconstructed,
since 'consciousness' fgures, so to speak on both sides of the equaton.
Certinly there can be no 'real life-process' without it
c problem may spring fom the fact tat te term 'consciousness' here
is being pressed into double serice. It can mean 'mental life' in general; or it
can allude more specifcally to partcular historical systems of beliefs
(relgious, juridical, politcal and so on), of the kind M wllater come to
ascribe to the so-called 'superstuctre' in contrst to te economic 'base'. If
one is thinkng of conscousness i ts second sense, as well-artculated
stuctures of doctine, its opposition to 'practcal actvity' becomes rather
more plausible. It belongs to te Marist case tat suc superstctres are
indeed estranged from their practcal, productve 'base', and the causes of
tis estangement inere in the very nature of tat material actvity. This,
however, will not entrely meee the point, since for a their alienated
caracter suc ideological discourses stlpowerfully conditon our real-life
practces. Politcal, religious, sexual and other ideological idioms are part of
te way we 'live' our material conditon, not juse the bad dream or dispos
able efuence of te infrastcture. Bue te case holds even les i we keep eo
the broader sene of consciousnes, since without it there would be no
distnctvely human actvt ae all Factory labour is noe a set of material
practces plus a set of notons about it; witout certain embodied intentons
73
Ideolog
meanings, interpretatons, it would not count as factor labour at al .
It is necessary, ten, to distnguish two rather diferent cases which Te
Geran Ideolog threatens to confate. On the one hand, there is a general
materialist theis that ideas and material actvity are inseparably bound up
together, as against the idealist tendency to isolate. and privilege te former.
On the other hand, there is the historcal materialist argument that certain
historically specifc forms of consciousnes become separated out fom
productve actvity, and can best be explained in terms of teir functonal
role in susta it. In Th Geran Ideolo it is occasionally as though M
and Enels illicitly fold the latter case into the forer, vieng 'what men
and women actually do' as a kind of 'base', and their ideas about what they
do as a sort of 'superstructure'. But the relaton between my act of fring an
wand my conceptons about it is not the Same as the relaton between the
economc actvite of capitalist soiety and the rhetoric of parliamentar
democracy One mght add tat thinng, writng and imagining are of
course just as much part of the 'real life-process' as digging ditches and
subvertng mitar juntas; and that if the phse 'real life-process' is in ts
sene disablly narrow in Marx and Engels's text it u also unhelpfully
amorphous, undiferentatedly spanthe whole of ' sensuous prctce'.
At one point in their work, Marx and Engels would seem to conjure a
cronological diference out of m distnction between two meanings of
'consciousness', when they remark that 'the production of ideas, of concep
tions, of consciousness, is at firt directy interoven with te material
actvity and the material intercourse of men, te language of reallife.'8 What
they have in mind here is the momentous historcal event of the 'division of
mental and manual labour. Once an economc surplus permit a mnorit of
'professional' thinkers to be released fom the exigencies of labour, it
becomes possible for consciousness to 'fatter' itself tat it is in fact in
dependent of material reality. 'Frm now on', Mar and Engels obsere,
'consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from te world and to
preed to the formaton of "pure" theor, teology, philosophy, etics, etc.
So it is as though one epistemological case holds true for societes predating
the division of mental and manual labour, while another is appropriate to all
subsequent histor. This cannot of course be what they mean: te 'practcal'
consciousess of priests and phlosophers will continue to be 'directly
interwoven with their material actvity, even i the theoretcal doctines
they produce are loftily aloof fom it. Te important point, however, is tat
the scism between idea and social reaty explored by te text is, so to
74
Frm Enlihtnment to Second Intrational
speak, a dislocaton internal to social reality itself in specifc historical
conditons. It may be a ilusion to believe that ideas are the essence of social
life; but it is not an ilusion to beleve that they are relatvely autonomous of
it since d i itelf a material fact wth particular social determintons.
Ad once ths condition has set in, it provides the real material basis for te
former ideological error. It is not just that ideas have foated free of social
existence, perhaps on account of the hubris of a handful of intelectals; on
the contrary, d 'externality' of ideas to the material life-process is itself
interal to that process.
Th German Ideolog appears at once to argue that consciousness is indeed
always 'practcal' consciousness, so chat to view it in any other light is an
idealist ilusion; and tat ideas are sheerly secondary to material existence. It
therefore needs a knd of imagery whch equivocates between seeing
consciousness as indissociable from acton, and regarding it as separable and
'inferior'; and it fnds ths in the language of 'refexes', 'echoes' and 'sub
limates'. A refex is in one sense part of what it refects, my image in the
miror is in some sense me, and at the same time a secondary, 'second best'
phenomenon. Why Mn and Engels want to relegate consciousness to tis
second-hand status is clear enough; for if what we think we are doing is
actually constttive of what we are doing, if our conceptions are internal to
our practce, what room does this leave for false consciousness? Is it enough
to ask George Bush what he thinks he is doing to arve at a satsfactory
account of his role wthin advanced capitalism? Marx and Engels see well
enough that human agent are often for good historical reasons self
deceived a to the signfcance of their own acton; I have no unfailingly
privileged access to the meaning of my own behaviour, and you can some
tmes supply me wth a more cogent explanation of it than I can produce
mysel But it does not folow from ths that there is somethng called 'what
we do' which is independent of meanings altogether. For an action to be a
human practce, it must incarnate meaning; but its more general signifcance
is not necessarly the one the agent ascribes to it. When Mar and Engels
speak of setting out from 'real, active men' rather than from what these
'men' say, imagne and conceive, they sail perilously close to a naive sensuous
empiricism which fails to grasp that there is no 'real life-process' wthout
interpretation. To attempt to 'suspend' tis realm of meaning in order the
better to examine 'real' conditons would be lie kllng a patient to examine
more conveniently the circulaton of her blood. A Rymond Williams has
commented, ths 'objectvist fantasy' presumes that real life conditions 'can
/J
Ideolog
be known independently of language and of historical records'. It i not,
Williams observes, as though there is 'rt material social life and then at
some temporal or spatal distce, consciousness and "its" products . . .
consciousness and it products are always, though in variable forms, part of
the material social process itself.10 Mand Engels's hypnotc insistence on
tenn like 'real', 'sensuous, 'actual', 'practical', brisky and scorully
contrasted with mere 'ideas', makes them a sound a little le FKLeavis on a
bad day. And just as they cannot ignore interpretation in te case of the men
and women they discuss, neither can they overlook it in teir own case. For
although they claim in empiricist vein to have no premisses of their own
other than that of startng from 'real men', it is of course clear enough that
what counts for them as real is by no means innocent of theoretcal
assumptons. In tis sense too, the 'real life-process' is bound up wit
'consciousness': that of the analysts themselves.
We need, however, to look rather more closely at the metaphor of
'inversion' which contols much of this account of ideology. It should b
noted frst of all that to invert a polarity is not necessarily to tansform it.
Litrle is to be gained by upending idealsm into mechanical materialism,
makin tought a functon of reality rather d vice versa. Ironically
enough, this gesture mimes idealism in the act of upbraiding it since a
tought reduced to a 'refex' or 'sublimate' is quite a immateral as one
sequestered from reality. The celebrated camera obscura image is telling here,
suggestng a it does that the Hegelians have simply got the word the wrong
way up. The image itelf has a history stetcing back to the father of
empiricist phlosophy John Locke. who like many others saw the camera
obscura as a prototype of exact, scientifc refecton. It is thus ironic, as WJ.T.
Mitchell points out, that Mshould use this same device as the very model
of illusion.1I Yet the empiricist history behind the metaphor is retained in
Mar's deployment of ic the human mind is like a camera, passively
recording objects in te external world. Given te assumpton that te
camera cannot lie, the only way in whch it could generate ditorton would
be by some kind ofbuilt-in interference wt te image. For this cmera ha
no operator, and we therefore cannot speak of ideology on dmodel as an
actve slantng, editing and misinterpreting of social reality. as we could, say,
in te case of the hand-held camera of the news photographer. The
implicaton of the metaphor, then is tat idealism is really a kind of inverted
empircism. Instead of deriving ideas from reality, it derves reality from
ideas. But d is surely a caricatre of philosophical idealism, one partly
76
Frm Enlihtnmnt t Sond Inttonl
determied by the image i
queston. Fr the thnkers whom Ma and
Engels are seeking to combat are not just topsy-trvy empiricist or capsied
mecal materialst: on the conty, one of te most valuable aspect of
their theor for Mxism itelf is tat human conscousnes is a actve,
dynamic force. Nt thers a diverse a Lm Luc w later
tm dnoton to revolutonar ends; but the camera obscura model is really
unble to accommoat it Th dtcdy unn oent fure force ideam
into it ow empircist mould, de it a it mere opposite.
Tis blidspot h disbling ef ect on the tet's overall tery of
ideology. Fr it is hard to see on m account how ideology c be in ay
sense an actve soial force, organizing the experence of human subject i
accordance wit the requirement of a specc sol order. Its efect,
instead, would seem almost entely negatve: it is merely a set of chmeras
which perpetuate tat order by disractin
g
it citens from otherwse palpable
inequality and ijustce. Ideology here is essentl y otherworldlins: an
iay reoluton of real contadictons which blids men ad women to
te m actality of their sol conditons. It functon is less to equip
tem with certn dcourses of value and belief relevat to their day Q,
t to denigrate that whole quotdian realm in contat with a fantaized
metaphysial world. It is as tough ideology has no partcular interest in, say,
inculcatn the virtues of trift, honesty and industousness in the working
class by a range of discpliry techques, but simply denies that the sphere
of work has much signmcance at all in contat with the kingdom of heaven
or te Absolute Idea. And wheter any regime could reproduce itelf by dint
of an ideology a generalized and negtve as ts is surely questonable.
WJ.T. Mtcell h poited out tt one implcton of the camera obscura
fgure is of a pure, unmediated reaton beteen human subjects and tei
soial environment and that'this emphasis is clearly at odds wt what te
tet h to say elsewhere about conciousness a a soia prouctl2 Indeed, a
Mtchell obseres, te asumption tat te sensuous world is given direcdy
to consciousnes is part of what te authors of 1Gran Idolog critcize
elsewhere i te work of Fuerbac Mad Engels. i oter words, tend
to counterpose a docte of te socially constcted nature of knowledge
against a naive sensuous empiricism and a nive sensuous empircism
agait ideasm's insistence on the dcurively medated natre of realty. At
one level, they perpetate in tnsformed mode the 'ideology of the
Enlightenment, reducng idea to sensatonl life - tough tat life is now
fmly defned as practcal, sol and productve. At another level. fom a
77
Ideolog
wholly opposed politcal perspectve, tey shae in Napoleon's brisk
pragatic contempt for 'ideology', in the sense of a fantastcal idealism.
For Te Geran Ideolog ideologcal consciousness would seem to involve a
double movement of inveion and dislocation Ideas are assigned priority in
soial life, and simultaneously disconected from it. One can follow te
logic of tis dual operaton easily enough: to make ideas the source of
hstory is to deny their social determinants, and so to uncouple them from
history. But it is not clear tat suc an inversion need always entail suc a
dislocaton. One could imagine someone holding that consciousness was
autonomous of material life without necessarily believing tat it was its
foundaton; and one can equally imagine someone asserting that mind was
te esence of all realty without claimng tat it was isolated from it. In fact
te latter positon is probably that of Hegel himsel Does ideology
es entally consist i seei ideas as socially determining, or i regardig
tem a autonomous? A ideologue like de Trc might be said to hod to
the former case, but not to the latter. Marx hmsef tought te French
ideologues were idealists, in so far as tey dehistoricized human conscious
ness and ascribed it a foundatonal social role; but tey are plainly not ideal
ists i te sense of beleving that ideas drop from te sky. Tere is a problem,
i oter words, about how bts model ofideology can be generalzed as a
paradigm of all false consciousness. Mar and Engels are of course
eamn the Gran ideology, a partcular current of neo-Hegelian
idealim, but their formulatons have often enough a universalizing favour
about them m fact - i a deleted passage of the work - they remark that
what is true of German thought is true of other natons too. Te obvious
rposte to t as M and Engels in other moos well ke, i that not
ideology is idealst. M cery regarded Hobb, Condillac and
Bentam as fll-bloded ideologists, yet all three are i some sense material
it. Only i a broad sense of 'idealsm', meanig i efect dehiorcizing or
presuming some invariable human essence, can tey bsaid to be guilty of
the carge. But to dehistorcize is not synonymous wit being an idealist.
just a, conversely, an idealism suc a Hegel's is profoundly historcal.
Is it not possible that certain ideas may have a f rot in, material
realit. yet stl be ideological? Mut idea be empty ilusions to qualif for
idelogical sttus? M and Engels do not of course asume that any old
abstact idea is ideological: matematcal concepts are not usually so. But the
dconectedness of thought from practcal existence, in ways whch sere
78
From Enlihtenment to Setond Intrational
objectonable politcal ends, would seem for them defnitive of the notion.
There is then a strong temptaton to believe that we have only to put ideas
and realit back
together again for all to be well. This is not, of course, Mar
and Engels's own case: to overcome false consciousness demands tackling the
social contradictons which generte it, not simply reunitng abstuse ideas
with their lost soial origins. But in the hands of somewhat more 'vulgar'
Marxists, there is sometmes a suggestion that ideas are in a healthy state
when closely imbricated wit social practice. The objection to this is that
Edmund Burke would have found it entirely unobjectonable. A whole
lineage of conserative tought has tured on the 'organic' interpenetation
of conceptual thought and lived experience, as nervous as Marx and Engels
themselves of purely speculatve notons. It is then possible to imagine that
ideolog is not particular kinds of ideas with specifc functions and effects,
but just ideas which have somehow come unstuck from sensuous realit,
'he ideas of the ruling class', The Gennan Ideolog famously proclaims,
'are in every epoch the ruling ideas. i.e, the class which is the ruling matral
force of socety, is at the same tie its ruling intellectual force.u He who
dominates material production controls mental production too. But this
political model of ideology does not entirely square with the more episte
mologcal concepton of it as tought oblivious to it social orign. What is
it, then, that makes ideas ideological? That they are cut loose from their
social moorings, or that they are weapons of a dominant class? Ad does the
latter necessarily entail te former? 'The ruling ideas'. the text gos on to
comment, 'are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant
material relationshps. the domnant material relatonships grasped as
ideas.l' Ths would suggest a more 'interal' relaton beteen ideology and
material life than the 'illusion' model perhaps permits; but elsewhere te
work rns both emphases together by speakng of these ruling idea as
'merely the ilusor forms i whch the real struggles of the diferent classes
are fought out.lS Yet if thee frms encode real stuggles, in what sense are
they illusory? Perhaps in me sense that tey are purely 'phenomenal' mode
concealing ulterior motvatons; yet thi sense of 'illusory' need not be
synonymous with 'false', Appearnces, as Lenin reminds us, are after all real
enough; there may be a discreanc beteen material conficts and the
ideological form which express them. but this does not necessarily mean
tt those fons are either false (untue to what is the case) or 'unreal',
Te text, in other words, hesitates signifcantly beteen a politcal and an
epistemological defniton of ideology. Ideas may be said to be ideological
/
Ieolo
because tey deny teir root in social life with politcally oppressive efect;
or they may be ideological for exacdy the opposite reason - tat they are the
direct expressions of material interests, real instruments of class warfare. It so
happens that Mr and Engels are confrontng a ruling class whose
consciousness is heavily 'metaphysical' in character; and since this meta
physic is put to politcally dominatve uses, the two opposed sense of
ideology are at one in te historical situation The German Ieolog examines.
But there is no reason to suppose that all ruling classes need to infect their
interest in such a speculatve style. Lter on, in the Prece to the Cntribution
t a Crtique of Political Eonomy (1859), Mr will write of ' the legal. politcal,
religious, aestetc, or philosophic - in short, ideological forms in whic
men become conscious of this (economic) conflict and fght it out.' The
reference to illusor forms, signifcandy, has here been dropped; there i no
partcular sugestion that these 'superstrucrural' modes are i any sense
cimerical or fantastc. The definiton of ideology, we may note, has also
been widened to encompass all 'men', rater than just the governng clas;
ideology has now the rather less pejoratve sense of the class stuggle at the
level of ideas, with no necessary implication tat these ideas are always fl.
In fact in Teores oSutlus Vlue Marx draws a distinction between what he
calls 'the ideological component parts of the r class' and te 'free
spiritual producton of cs parcular social formaton', one instance of the
latter being a and poetry.
The Prece to A Cntribution to the Crtique of Political Econom
y lays out the
famous (or notorious) Marst formulaton of , base' and 'superstucture', and
seems to locate ideology frmly wth the latter:
I the soial proucton of teir life, men enter into defnite relaton tht
are indispensable and independent of their wh,relaton of producton that
correspond to a defnite stage of deelopment of their materal prouctve
forces. Te sum total of thee relatons of producton consttutes the econ
omc stucture of soiet. the real foundaton, on whc rises a legal and poli
tcal superstucture and to whc correspnd defnite fors of socal
consciousness. The mode of producton of material life conditions te social,
politcal and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of
men that determine teir being put. on the contrry, their social being that
determine their consciousnes.16
80
Frm Enlihtment to Seon Intrtional
We can take it, perhaps, tat 'defInte forms of soial consciousness' is
equivalent to ideology, tough the equaton is not unproblematc. Tere
could be forms of social consciousnes which were non-ideological, eiter m
the sene of not helpin to legitate clas-rule, or m the sene that they
were not partcularly cental to any form of power-stgle. Marxism itelf
is a form of soial consciousness, but whether it is an ideolog depends on
which meaning of the term one hin mind. Mar clearly hin mnd here
specifc historical belief-systems and 'world vies'; and, as I have argued in
the case of TGeran Ideolog it is rather more plausible to see conscious
ness i thi sense as detenined by material prctce, rather mconscious
ness i its wider sense of meanings, values, intentons and the rest. It is hard
to see how that can be simply 'superstructural', i it is actually interal to
material producton
But if Ma is speaking historically here, what are we to make of the b
sentence of the quotaton? 'It is not te consciousnes of men tt deter
mines teir being but. on the contr, teir social bei tat determine
their conscousness'. Ts is an ontologca not just an htoric cla it
follows for M from the way the human lis consttted, and would
be tue of all men and women in all hitorical epochs. One efect of tis
properly universalizin doctine is to make the 'base-superstuctre' theis
with which it sits cheek by jowl appear to be universal to. Not all Marist.
however, have taken dview; and whether Ma himself did elsewhere in
his work is a matter of debate. Fr we can always raise te queston: why does
human productve actvity need a superstucture? And one answer to tat
queston would be: because in history to date it mivolved exploitatve
soial relatons, whic must then be rared and regulated i legal, politc
and ideological terms. A superstucture is necessary because the material
base is self-divided. And were it to overcome tose division. so some
Marxist have contended, te superstructure would wither away. In a full
communist society, so te argument goes, there would no longer be any
need for a politcal stte whc set itelf over agait cvil soiet, or for a
legtmatng rulin ideology, or een for the parapher of an abstct
'legality'.
Implicit in the noton of a superstucture, i oter words, is the idea of
certain insttuton which are esranged from material life, set over againt it
a a domnatve force. Whether such insttutons - law cour, the poltcal
state, ideological apparatuse - could i fact ever be abolished, or whether
such a clai is idly utopian, is not the point to pursue here. What is rther at
81
Ieolog
issue i the apparent contradicton between ts hitorical version of the base
superstucture doctrine, whic would see te superstructure as fnctonal
for the regulaton of class stuggle, and the more universal implicatons of
Mar's comment about consciousness and social being. On the former
model. ideology h a limted historical life-span: once the contadictons of
class socety had been surmounted, it would witer away along with the rest
of the superstcture. On the latter version, ideology might be taken to
mean something le the way the whole of our consciousness is conditoned
by materal factors. And thi will presumably not change with te etablish
ment of full communism, since it is just as much a part of our biological
make-up as the need to eat. The twin emphases of the quoted passage, then,
point respectvely towards the narrower and the broader senses of ideology
dt we have examned already; but te relationship beteen them is not
exacty clear. A politcal case is caught up, somewhat obscurely, with an
ontologcal or epistemological one: is a superstructure (and ideology along
with it) a historically functonal phenomenon, or is it as natural to human
societe as breathing?
The base-superstructure doctne has been widely attacked for bei
sttc, herarccal, dualistc and mechanistc, even in those more sophis
tcated accounts of it i which the superstructure reacts back dialectcally to
conditon the material bae. It might therefore be timely and suitably
unfashionable to enter a word or two in its defence. Let us be clear frst what
it is not assertng. It is not out to argue tat prisons and parliamentary
democracy, scool room and sexual fantasies, are any less real than steel
ml s or sterlng. Churches and cinemas are quite as material as coal mnes; it
i just dt on d argument, they cannot be the ultmate catalysts of
revolutonary social cane. The point of the base-superstructure doctne
les i the queston of determnatons - of what 'level' of soial life most
powerfully and crcially conditons the others, and therefore of what arena
of actvity would be most relevant to efecting a thoroughgoin social
transformation.
To select material producton a tis crucial determinant is in one sense
to do no more than state the obvious. Fr there is surely no doubt that this is
what the vast m.ority of men and women throughout history have spent
their tme engaged on A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over
h or her astonishment cat most people who have lived and died have spent
lves of wretced, fruieless, unremittng .toil. Arrest history at any point
whatoever, and tis is what we will m. The sheer struggle for material
82
From Enlihtenment to Second Interational
survival and reproducton. in conditons of real or artifcially induced
scarcity. m ted up suc enormous resources of human energy that we
would surely expect to fnd its tces inscribed in the rest of what we do.
Material producton, then, is 'primary' in the sense that it forms the major
narrative of history to date; but it is primary also in the sense that without
thi particular narratve, no other stor would ever get off the ground. Such
producton is the precondition of the whole of our thought. The base
superstctre model, to be sure, claims more mjust d. it asserts not
ony that material producton is the preconditon of our other actvites, but
that it is the most fundamental detrinant of them. 'Food frst, morals later'
is ony a statement of the doctrine if some causal efcacy of food upon
morals is being suggested. It is not just a queston of priorites. How then is
ths determinacy best to be grasped?
'Superstucture' is a relational term. It designates the way in whic certain
soial insttutons act as 'supports' of the dominant social relatons. It invites
us to contextalie such insttutions in a certain way - to consider them in
teir functional relatons to a ruling social power. What is misleading, in my
view at least, is to leap fom this 'adjectval' sense of the term to a substantive
- to a f1ed, given 'realm' ofinstirtions which form 'the superstuctre', and
whch includes, say, flm. Ae cinemas superstructural phenomena? The
answer is sometimes yes and sometmes no. There may be aspects of a
partcular movie which underrite the given power reatons, and which are
to that extent 'superstuctral'. But there may be other aspects ofit whch do
not. A instituton may behave 'superstructrally' at one point in time, but
not at another, or in some of its activities but not in others. You can examine
a literar tet in terms of its publishing history, i which case as far as the
Marxist model goes, you are treatng it as part of the material base of social
production. Or you can count up the number of semicolons, an actvity
which would seem to ft neatly into neither level of the model. But once you
eplore that text's relatons to a dominant ideology, then you are treatng it
superstructrally. The doctine, in oter words, becomes rather more
plausible when it is viewed less as an ontological carving of the world down
the middle than as a question of diferent perspectves. If it u doubtful
whether Marx and Engels themselves would have agreed with ths reform
ulaton of their thesis, it is also doubtful in my view whether it maters
much.
So far, then, we seemto be landed by Marx with at least tee contending
senses of ideology, with no ver clear idea of their interrelatons. Ideolog
83
Ideolog
can denote illusory or socially disconected beliefs whic see temselves as
te ground of history, and which by distact men and women fom teir
actual social conditons (including the social determinants of their ideas),
sere to sust an oppressive politcal power. The opposite of tis would be
an accurate, unbiased kowledge of practcal social conditons. Alteratvely.
ideology can signif those ideas whic directly epress te material iteret
of te dominant social class, and whic are useful in promotng its rule. The
opposite of tis might be eiter true scientfc knowledge, or te conscious
ness of the non-domnnt classes. Fil y, ideology can be stetced to
encompass all of te conceptual forms in which the class struggle as a whole
is fought out, which would presumably include the valid consciousness of
politcally revolutionary forces. What the opposite of this might be is
presumably any conceptual form not currently caught up i such stuggle.
Auall this were not enough. Ma's later economic writng wcome
up wit a quite diferent version ofideology, to whch we can now tur
In his chapter on 'he Fetshism of Commodites' in Volume One of Capitl
(1867). Mr argues that in capitalist society the act social relatons
between human beins are governed by te apparently autonomous inter
actons of te commodites the produce:
A commodity, therefore. is a mysterous thing, simply because in it the social
charcter of men's labour appear to them as an objectve character stamped
upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers
to the sum total of their own labour is preented to them as a
social relation existng not beteen themselve. but bteen the product
of their labour. . . . It is a definite social relaton beteen men, that
assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation beteen thing. In
order . . . to fnd an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped
regions of the religious world. In that world, the productons of the
human brain appear as independent being endowed with life, and
entering into relatons both with one another and with the human
race. So it is in the world of commodites with the product of men's
hands.17
The earlier theme of alienaton is here extended: men and women fashion
products which then come to escape their contol and determne their
84
Fom Enlihtmet t Scond Inttionl
conditon of existence. A fuctaton on the sto echange can mean
unemployment for thousands. By virtue of this 'commodit fethism', real
human relaton appea, mystgly, a relatons beteen things; and this
mseveral conequences of an ideological knd. Fist, the real workngs of
soety are thereby veiled and ocluded: te social caracter of labour is
concealed behnd the ciculaton of comodite, whic are no longer
recognable as social product. Secondly - though this is a point developed
ony by the later Marxist traditon - societ is fagmented by tis
commodity logic: it is no longer easy to grsp it a a totality, gven the
atomizin operatons of te commodity, whic tranmute the collectve
actvity of socal labour into relaton beteen dead, diete t Ad by
ceaing to appea a a totty, the capitalist order renders itslf less vulner
able to politcal critque. Finl y, the fact tat social life is dominated by
inanimate enttes lends it a spurous air of naturalness and inevitability:
soiety is no longer perceptble as a human contruct, and therefore a
humanly alterable.
It is clear, then, tat the motf of inversion passes over from Marx's early
comments on ideology to hs 'mature' work Several things, however, have
decisively altered in tansit To beg wit, d curious inversion beteen
hun subject and their conditons of existence is now inherent in social
reality itsel It is not simply a queston of te distorted percepton of human
beings, who invert the real world in teir consciousness and thus imagine
that comodites contol their lives. Mr is not cla that under
capitalism commodites appear to exercise a tyrannical sway over social
relations; he is argui tat they actually do. Ideology is now less a matte of
reality becoming inverted in the mnd, than of the mind reflectng a real
inverion. mfact it is no longer prmarily a queston of conciounesat albut
is ancored in the day-to-day economic operaton of te capitalist system
Ad if this is so then ideology has been, so to speak. tansferred from the
superstucture to te base, or at leat signals some peculiarly close relaton
beteen tem It is a fncton of the capitalist economy itself, whic a Aex
Calinicos obsere 'produce it own mispercepton',18 rater d in te
frst place a matter of discourses, beliefs and 'superstructural' inttutons.
We need, then, a Etenne Baliba put it 'to m both te real and the
imaginar within ideology',19 rather d conceiving of these realm a
simply eteral to one anoter,
Elsewhere in Capitl, Mr argues tat tere is a disjuncton in capitalism
beteen how tg actual y are and how te preent themselve -
8>
Ideolog
beteen. in Hegelian tenns, 'essences' and 'phenomena'. The wage relaton.
for eample, is in realty an unequal, exploitatve afair; but it 'natrally'
presents itself as an equal, reciprocal exchange of so much money for so
much labour. A Jorge Larrain usefully summare tese dislocatons:
Circulaton, for instance, appears as that which is immediately present on the
surface of bourgeois soiety, but it immediate being is pure semblance . . . .
Profit i a phenomenal form of surplus-value whic has me vrtUe
of obscurng the real basis of it existence. Competton i a phenomenon
which conceals determination of value by labour-time. The
value-relaton between commodites disguises a defnte soial relaton
beteen men. The wage-for extnguishes ever tace of me divsion of
the working-day into necesary labour and surplus labour, and
on2
Once again, all ths is not in the frst place a question of some misperceiving
consciousness: it i rather that tere i a kind of dissembling or duplicity
built into the very economc structures of capitalism, such tat it cannot
help presentng itself to consciousness in ways askew to what it actually is.
Mystfcaton, so t speak, is an 'objective' fact, embedded in the ver
character of the system: tere is an unavoidable structral contradicton
beteen that system's real contents, and te phenomenal forms in whch
tose contents profer temselves spontaneously to the mnd. A Norman
Geras has written: 'here exsts, at the interior of capitlism, a kind of
itr ruptre between te social relatons whic obtain and the manner
in which they are eperienced.21 And if ts is so, ten ideology cannot
sprng in te first instance from the consciousness of a dominant class, stll
les fom some sort of conspiracy. A Joh Mepham put te poinr ideology
is now not a mater of te boureoiie, but of bou
r
eoi societ24
In te case of commodity fetshsm, te mind refects an inversion in
reality itself; and tere are tory teoretcal problems about what an
'inversion in realty' could possibly mean. In the case of some other capitalist
economc processes, however, te mnd refects a phenomenal form whic is
itelf an inversion of the reaL For te sake of explicaton, we can break this
operaton down into three distnct moments. First, some kind of inversion
te place i the real world: instead of lving labour employing inanimate
capital, for example. dead capital contols lve labour. Secondly. there is a
disjuncton or contadicton between this real stte of U a.and the way it
86
From Enlihtnmet to Second Intrational
'phenomenally' appears: in te wage contract, te outard form rectifes the
inversion, to make the relatons beteen labour and capital seem equal and
symmetcal. In a third moment, this phenomenal form is obediently
refected by the mind, and tis is how ideological consciousness is bred.
Note that whereas in The German Ideolog ideolog was a matter of not
seing tgs a the really were, it is a queston in Cpitl of realit itself
being duplicitous and deceitul. Ideology can thus no longer be unmasked
simply by a clear-yed attenton to the 'real lifeprocess', since that process,
rther like the Freudian unconscious, puts out a set of semblances which are
somehow stuctural to it, includes its falsity wthin its tut. What is needed
instead is 'science' - for science, as Marx comments, becomes necessary once
esences and appearances fail to coincide. We would not require scientfc
labour if the law of physics were spontaneously apparent to us, inscribed on
the bodies of the objects around us.
Te advantage of this new theory of ideology over the case pressed in Te
German Ieolog is surely clear. Whereas ideology in the earlier work
appeared as idealist speculaton, it is now given a secure grounding in the
material practices of bourgeois societ. It is no longer wholly reducible to
false conscousness: the idea of falsit lingers on in the noton of deceptve
appearances, but tese are less fctons of the mnd tan stuctural efect of
capitalism. If capitalist reality folds its own falsehood within itself then this
falsehood must be somehow real. And there are ideological effects such as
commodity fetishism which are by no means unreal, however much they
may involve mystifcation. One might feel, however, that if The German
Ieolog risk relegatng ideological forms to a realm of unrealit, the later
work of Mr pulls them a little too close to reality for comfort. Have we not
merely replaced a potental idealism of ideolog with an incipient economim
ofit? Is all that we dub ideolog really reducible to the economic operations
of capitalism? Georg Lukacs will claim later tat 'there is no problem that
does not ultmately lead back to [the] question [of commodity producton];
and that ts stucture 'permeat[es] every expression oflife';23 but one might
fmd the claim a trife overeening. In what important sense, for instance,
can te doctine that men are superior to women, or whites to blacks, be
traced back to some secret source in commodity production? And what are
we to say of the ideological formatons of societes to which commodity
producton is as yet unkown, or not yet centrl? A certain essentalism of
ideology would seem at play here, reducing te varety of ideological
mesms and efects to a homogeneous cause. Moreover, if the capitalist
87
Ieolog
economy h it own but-in devices of decepton - i a Theodor Adoro
somewhere remarks, 'the commodit is its own ideology' - what need is
there for specifcally ideologica
l
insttutons at the level of the 'super
strcture'? Perhaps just to reinforce efects already endemc in the economy
but the anwer is surely a little lame. Mar may well have discovered one
potent source of false consciousnes in bourgeois society; but whether this
can be generaled to account for ideology as a whole is surely questonable.
In what sense, for example, is d vie of ideology ted up with class
stuggle? The theory of commodit fetshism forges a dramatcally
immediate link beteen capitalist productve actvit and human conscious
nes, between the economic and the experental; but it does so, one mght
cmony by short-crcuitng the level of the specifcally poltcal. Are al
social classe indiferenty in the grip of commodity fetshism? Do workers,
peasant and capitalists all share te same ideological universe, universally
imprinted as they are by te material stucture of capitalism?
Mar's case in the 'Ftshism of Commodites' chapter would seem to
retin two dubious features from his earlier version of ideology it
empiricism. and its negatvism. Capitl appears to argue tat our percepton
(or mispercepton) of realt i somehow already iment in realt itself;
and this belief that the real already contains the knowledge or ms
knowledge of itself is arguably an empiricist doctine. What it suppreses u
precisely the business of what human agents make, variably and confictively,
of these material mechanisms - of how they discursively construct and
interpret them in accordance with partcular interests and belefs. Human
subjects fgure here as the mere passive recipients of certain objectve efects,
the dupes of a soial stucture given spontneously to their consciousness.
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is said to have enquired of a
colleague why peple considered it more natural to hold that the sun moved
round the earth rather can vice versa. On being told that it simply looked
tat way, he enquired what it would look like if the earh moved round the
sun The point, of course, is that one does not here simply derve an error
from the nature of the appearances, for the appearances are in both cases the
same.
If the later theory also reproduces the negatvism of The Genan Ieolog
it is because ideology would once more seem to have no oter purpose tan
to conceal the truth of class society. It is less an actve force i the consttuton
of human subjectvity tan a mask or screen which prevent an already
consttuted subject from grasping what lies in front ofit. And ts, whatever
88
Frm Enlihtmt t &mInttionl
partal tth it may contin, surely fails to account for the real power and
complexity of ideological formatons.
Mhimself never used the phae 'flse conciousness', a distncton which
must b accorded insted co h collaborator Frederic Engels. ma letter to
Mehring of 1 893, Engels speaks of ideology a a proces of false
conscousness because 'te real motves impelg [the agent) remain
unknown to him, oterwise it would not be an ideologcal process at all.
Hence he imagine false or apparent motves.' Ideology is here i efect
rtonton - a kind of double motvaton in whch the surface me
seres to blo from consciousness the subject'S true purpose. It i perhaps
not surrising that ths defton of ideology should have arsen i the age
of Freud. A Jo McCaey bargued, the falsehoo at stake here i a matter
of self-decepton. not of gettng te world wrong.24 Tere is no reason to
suppose that te surface belief necesaily ivolve empirical flsit, or i in
any sene 'uneal'. Someone really may love aa while beig unaware
tat his benign authorit over them compensate for a lack of power wt
the labour process. Engels goes on in his letter to add the famiiar rider fom
Te Gran Ideolog about 'autonomous' thought but it is not evident why
all those who are deceived about their own motve should b victms of a
gulible tst in 'pure thought'. What Engels mens utht in the proess of
ratonton the te motve stands to the apparent one a the 'real life
process' stands to the illusory idea in te earlier moel But in that moel,
the ideas in queston were also ofen flse 'in themselve', metphysical delu
sion with no rot in realty, where the apparent motve i rtonton
may b authentc enough.
Towards the end of te nneteenth centry, in the period of the Second
Intertonal, ideology contnues to ret the sene of flse conciousnes,
in contast to a 'scientc socalism' whic h disced the tue bw of
hstorical development. Ideology, according to Engels in Anti-Dihrng, can
then b seen as the 'deducton of realt not frm itelf but fom a concept>25
- a fonnulaton which it i hard to m muc sn o Lurking on the
edge of ts partcular defmton. however, is a broader sense of ideology a
any kind of socially determied tought, whic i rel y to elastc to b of
much u. Fr the M of 1 Gnan Ideolog all thought i socially
detennned, but ideology is thought which deie ts deteton. or
rather thought so socially detn ed as to deny it own detents. But a
new current is also strring i t perio, whc pic up on the later Mar's
89
Ideolo
sense of ideology a the ment forms witn whic men and women fght
out their social confct, and whic thus b to speak boldly of 'soialist
ideology'. a phrase whic for Te Geran Ideolog would have been
oxoronic. Te revsionist Mt Eduad Bertein w the ft to dub
Marism itelf an ideology. and in What I T Be Done? we fnd lnin
declaring tat 'the only choice is - either bourgeois or sociast ideology'.
Som Lenin writes, is 'the ideology of struggle of the proletarian class';
but he does not mean by tis tt socialism is the spontneous expression of
prolet conciousness. On the contar, 'i the clas stugle of the
prletrat which develops spontaneously. as an elemental force. on the basis
of capitt relatons, som is introduced by the ideologues.'26 Ideology, in
shor m now become identcal with the scientc theory of historical
matem. and we have retured full crcle to the Enightenent
philosophes The 'ideologist' is no longer one foundering in false conscious
nes but the exact reverse. the scientfic analyst of the fundamental law of
soiety and its thought formatons.
Te situaton, i short, is now thoroughly confused. Ideolog would now
seem to denote simultaneously false consciousness (Engels), al socially
conditoned thought (Plekhanov), the politcal crusade of sosm
(ertein and sometmes lenin), and the scientfc theory of socialism
(enin). It is not hard to see how these confusions have come about. They
stem i efect from the equivocaton we noted i te work of Mar between
ideology as illusion, and ideolo as the intellectual armour of a social class.
Or, to put it another way, they refect a confict between the epistemological
and politcal mea of the term. In the second sense of the word, what
matters is not the caracter of te beliefs in question, bur their function and
perhaps their origin; and there is tus no reason why these beliefs should
necessarily be flse in themselves. True conceptions can be put to te serice
of a dominant power. Te falsity of ideology in ts context, then, is te
'falsity' of class rule itself but here, crucially, the term 'false' has shifted
ground from it epistemological to its etical sense. Once one hs adopted
ts defition, however, the path is then open to extending the term
ideology to proletarian class consciousness too, since that is also a matter of
deploying ideas for politcal purposes. And if ideology thus comes to mean
any system of doctrines expressive of class interests and serviceable in their
realiaton, there is no reason why it should not, o la Lenin, be used of
Mm itsel
A the meaning of ideology mutates in d way. so, ineitably, does
0
From Enlihtnmet to Second Intrtional
whatever is held to be its opposite. For The German Ieolog, te opposite of
ideology would seem to be seeing reality as it actually is; for Cpital things
are not so simple, since that reality, as we have seen. is now intinsically
treacherous, and tere is thus the need for a special discoure kown as
scence to penetrate its phenomenal forms and lay bare its essences. Once
ideology shifts from its epistemologcal to it more political sense, there are
now two candidates available as its antithesis, and the relatons between
them are deeply fraught. What can counter the dominant ideology is either
the science of historical materialism, or proletarian class consciousness. For
'historicist' Marxism. a we shall see in te next chapter, the former is
essentially an 'expression' of the latter: Marxist theory is the fullest self
consciousness of te revolutionary workng class. For Leninism, ideology in
te sense of 'scientifc theory' must maintain a certain enabling distance
from ideology in the sene of proletarian class consciousness, i order to
interene creatively within it.
But te wider meaning of ideology as any form of socially determined
thought interenes to interrogate this distincton. If all thought is socially
determined, then so too must be Marxism, in whic case what becomes of
its claims to scientifc objectivity? Yet if tese claims are simply dropped,
how are we to adjudicate beteen te truth of Marxism and the trut of te
belief systems it opposes? Would not the opposite of the ruling ideology
ten be simply an alternatve ideology, and on what ratonal grounds would
we choose between tem? We are sliding. in shorr, into the mire of historical
relatvism; but the only alternative to tat would appear to be some form of
positvism or scientfc rationalism which repressed its own enabling histor
ical conditons, and so was ideological in all the worst ways oudined by The
Geran Ideolog What if in te most strikng irony of all, Marxism itself has
ended up as a prime example of the very forms of metaphysical or
transcendental thought it set out to discredit, trustng to a scientfc ration
alism which foated disinterestedly above history?
91
4
FR O M L U KA c s T O
G R A MS C I
`OTNKof Marsm as the scientc analysis of social formatons. and to
uof it as ideas in actve stuggle. w tend to yield to quite diferent
epistemologies. In te former case, consciousness i essentally contempla
tive. seekng to 'match' or 'correspond to' its object in the greatest possible
accuracy of cogntion. In the latter case, consciousness is muc more
obviously par of social reality, a dynamic force i it potental tansforma
tion. And if ths is so, then to a thinker like Georg Lukacs it would not seem
entrely appropriate to speak of wheter such thought 'refects' or 'ft' the
history wit which it is inseparably bound up.
If conciousness is grasped in tis way as a tansfonnatve force at one
with te reality it seeks to cange, then there would seem to be no 'space'
beteen it and that reality in which false consciousness mght germnate.
Ideas cannot be 'untrue' to their object if they are actually part of it. In te
terms of the philosopher JL. Austin, we can speak of a 'constative' uterance;
one which aims to describe the world, as either true or false; but it would not
make sense to speak of a 'performative' statement as eiter correcty or
incorrectly 'refectng' realty. I a not decrbing
ayn when I promise to
take you to the teate, or curse you for spilling ink on my shirt. If I
ceremonally name a ship, or stand with you before a clergyman and say 'I
do', tese are materal events in reality. acts as efcacious as ironng my
soks. not 'pictures' of some state of afairs which could be said to be
accurate or mstaken.
/
.
93
Ieolog
Does this mean, then, tat the model of consciousness as cognitive (or
miscognitive) should be ousted by an image of consciousness as perrative?
Not eactly for it is clear tat this opposition can be t some degree
deconstructed. There is no point in my promsing to take you to the theatre
if the theatre in queston was closed down for gross obscenty last week and I
unaware of the fact. My act of cursing is empty if what I thought was an
ink stain on my shrt is just part of the foral design. Al 'performatve' acts
involve cogniton of some kind, implicate some sense of how the world
actually is; it is fute for a politcal group to hone it ideas in the struggle
with some oppressive power if the power in queston collapsed three years
ago and they simply have not noticed.
In hs great work Hitor and Clas Conciounes (1922), te Hungarian
Marist Georg Lukacs takes full account of this point. 'It is true', Lukacs
writes there, 'that reality is te criterion for the correcmess of thought. But
reality is not, it becomes - and to become the partcipation of thought is
needed.'1 Thought, we might say, is at once cognitive and creative: in the act
of understanding its real conditons, an oppressed group or class ha begun
in that very moment to fashion the forms of consciousness whch will
contibute to changing them.And ts is why no simple 'reflecton' model of
consciousness will really do. 'Thought and existence', Lukacs writes, 'are not
identical in te sense that they "correspond" to each other, or "reflect" each
other, that they "run parallel" to each other or "coincide" with each other (all
expressions that conceal a rigid duality). Their identity is that they are
apect of one and the same real historical and dialectcal proces.2 The
cognition of the revolutionary proletariat. for Lukacs, is part of the sitation
it cognies, and alters that sitaton at a stoke. If ths logic is presed to an
extreme, then it would seem that we never simply know some 'thing', since
our act of kowing it has already transformed it into somethng else. le
model tacitly underlying ts doctrine is that of sel-knowledge; for to kow
myelf is no longer to be the self tat I was a moment before I kew it. It
would seem, in any case, that ths whole conception of consciousness as
essentally actve, practcal and dynamic. which Lukacs owes to the work of
Hegel. will force us to revise any too simplistc notion of false consciousness
a some lag. gap or disjunction beteen the way tings are and the way we
kow them.
Lukacs tkes over from aspects of the Second Interational the positive,
non-pejorative sense of the word ideology, writing unembarassedly for
Marxism as 'the ideological expression of the proletariat'; and ths is at least
+
Frm Lukc | Grami
one reason why the widespread view tat ideology for hm is synonymous
with false consciousness is simply mistaen. But he retains at the same time
the whole conceptual apparatus of Marx's critque of commoity fetshism.
and thus keeps alive a more critcal sene of the term. The 'other' or opposite
of ideology in this negative sense, however, is no longer priarily 'Marxist
science' but the concept of totlit; and one of the fnctons of this concept
i his work u to allow him to ditch the idea of some disinterested social
science without thereby falling prey to hstorical relatvism. A forms of
class consciousness are ideological; but some, so to spe are more ideo
logical than others. What is specifcally ideologcal about the bourgeoisie i
its inability to grasp the structure of the socal formaton as a whole, on
account of the dire efects of reifcation. Reicaton frgments and dislocates
our social expeence, so tat under it inluence we forget tat society is a
collectve proess and come see it instead merely as m or that isolated
object or insttton. A Lukacs's conteiporary Karl Korsch argues, ideology
is essentally a form of synecdoche, the fgure of speech in whch we take the
part for te whole. What is peculiar to proletarian consciousness, i it
fullest politcal development, is its capacity to 'totalize' the socal order, for
without such knowledge the working clas will never be able to understand
and transform its own conditons. A true recognton of its situaton will be,
inseparably, an insight into the social whole within whch it is oppressively
positoned; so that the moments in whch the proletariat come to self
consciousness, and knows the capitalist system for what it is, are in efect
identical.
Science, trth or theory, in other words, are no longer to be strictly
counterposed to ideology; on the contrary, they are just 'expressions' of a
paricular class ideology, the reolutonary world view of the working class:
Trth is just bourgeois society comng to consciousness of itself as a whole,
and te 'place' where this momentous event occurs is in the self-awareness
of the proletariat. Since the proletariat uthe prototypical commodity, forced
to sell its labour power in order to survive, it can be seen as the 'essence' of a
social order based on commodity fetshism; and the self-consciousness of the
proletariat is therefore, a it were, the commodity form coming to an
awareness of itself and in tat act transcending itelf
In coming to write Histor and ClasCnsciousnesLukacs found himself
faced with a kind of Hobson's choice or impossible opposition. On the one
hand, there was the positvist fantasy (inherted from the Second Intera
tonal) of a Marxist science which appeared to repress its own historical
>
ro t on te other hand, tere wa the specte of hstorcal reatvism. Eiter
knowledge was subliely eteal to te hstory it sought to know, or it was
just a matter of tis or that specfc brand of historical consciousness, with
no more m grounding t tt Lukacs's way of circmventng d
dilema is by intoducig the category of selreection There are certain
forms of knowledge - notbly, te sel-knowledge of a exploited class -
whch whe toroughly hstorical are neereles able to lay bare te limits
of oter ideologie, and so to fgure a an emancpatory force. Trut, i
Lukacs's 'hstoricist' perspecve,3 i always relatve to a partcular historical
sitaton never a metaphysical m beyond history altogether but te
proletariat, uniquely, i so hstorically positoned a to b able i principle to
unloc te secret of capitalism as a whole. There i thus no longer any need
to remai tapped with te sterile antthesis of ideoloy a false or partal
conciousnes on te one hand, and science as some absolute, unhistorical
mode of knowledge on the other. Fr not all clas conscousness i flse
conciouses, and science i simply an expresion or encodement of 'te'
class consciousness.
Lics's own way of phrasing ts argument is unlikely to w muc
unqued allegance today. The proletariat he cam, is a potentally
'universal' class, sice it bars with it te ptent emancipaton of all
huanity. It conscousnes i thus in principle universal; but a universal
subjectvity i in efect identcal with objectvty. So what te working class
knows, fom it ow partal historical perspectve, must be objectvely te.
One dos not need to be persuaded by mrather grandly Hegelan laguage
to recue te important insight buried within it. Lukacs sees quite rightly
that te contat bteen merely partal ideolocal standpoit on te one
hand, and some dispassionate views of te socal totty on te other, is
rdically misleading. For what doppositon fails to tke into account is te
stuaton of oppressed groups and classes, who need to get some ve of the
soial system a a whole, and of their own place withn it, siply to b able
to reale teir own pa, parcular interet. If women are to emancipate
tmselves, they need to have an iteret in understandig sometng of the
genera stuctre of patarchy. Such undertnding i by no means in oent
or diintereted; on te contary, it is i the servce of presig politcal
interest. But witout, as it were, passing over at some poit from te
parcular to te general, those interest are likely to founder. A colonial
pople, simply to survve, may fnd itself 'forced' to enquire ito the global
stuctures of imperialism. as teir imperialist rulers need not do. Tose who
96
From Lukc t Grami
today fashionably
disown the need for a 'global' or 'total' perspectve may be
privileged enough to dispense with it. It is where such a totality bears
urgently in on one's own immediate social conditons that the intersection
bteen parr and whole is most signifcantly established. Lukacs's point
is
tat certain groups and classes need to inscribe their own conditon within a
wider context if they are to cange that conditon; and in doing so they will
fnd themselve callengng the consciousness of those who have an interest
in blocking tis emancipatory knowledge. It is in tis sense that the bugbear
of relatvism is irrelevant for to claim tat al knowledge sprngs from a
spfc social stndpoint is not to imply that any old social standpoint
is a valuable for thee purposes as any other. If what one is looking for
is some understanding of the workings of imperialism a a whole, then
one would be singularly ill-advised to consult the Goveror General or the
Daj/y Tleraph's Arica correspondent, who will almost certainly deny its
existence.
Tere is, however, a logical problem with Lukacs's noton of some 'true'
class consciousness. Fr if the working class is the potental bearer of such
consciousness, from what viewpoint is this judgement made? It cannot be
made from the viewoint of the (ideal) proletariat itself since ths simply
begs te queston; but uonly that vewpoint is true, then it canot be made
from some standpoint exteral to it either. A Bhikhu Parekh points out, to
claim that only the proletarian perspectve allows one to grsp te truth of
soiety as a whole already assumes that one knows what that truth is. It
would seem that tth is either wholly interal to the consciousness of the
workg class, in which case it canot be assessed a tuth and the claim
becomes simply dogmatic; or one is caught in the impossible paradox of
judgg the tth fom outside the tth itself in which case the claim that
ts form of consciousness is true simply undercuts itsel
If the proletariat for Lukacs is in princple the bearer of a knowledge of
the social whole, it fgures as the direct antithesis of a bourgeois class sunk in
the mire of immediacy, unable to totalize irs own situaton. It is a taditonal
rxist case that what forestalls such knowledge in the case of the middle
clas is it atomized social and economic conditions: each individual
capitalist pursues his own interest, with little or no sense of how all of tese
isolated interests combine into a total system. Lukacs, however, places
emphasis rather on the phenomenon of reifcaton - a concept he derives
from Marx's doctne of commodity fetshism, but to whic he lends a
greatly etended meaning. Splicng together Marx's economic analysis and
97
Ieolog
Max Weber's theory of ratonalization. he argues in Hito
r
and Cia
Consciousnes that in capitalist society the commodity form peneates every
aspect of social life, taking the shape of a perasive mechanization. quant
fcation and dehumanization of human experience. The 'wholeness' of
soiety ubroken up into so many discrete, specialized, techncal operatons,
each of whic comes to assume a semi-autonomous life of it own and to
domnate human existence as a quasi-narural force. Purely formal tec
niques of calculabilit sufuse every region of society, from factory work to
politcal bureaucracy, journalism to the judiciary; and the narural sciences
themselves are simply one more instance of reifed thought. Overhelmed
by an opaque world of autonomous objects and instirutions, te human
subject is rapidly reuced to an inert, contemplative being, incapable of
recognizing any longer in these petrifed products its own creative practice.
The moment of revolutonary recogniton arrives when the working class
acknowledges this alienated world as its own confiscated creation.
reclaiming it through politcal praxis. In the tenns of the Hegelian philo
sophy which underlies Lukacs's thought. this would signal the reunfcation
of subject and object, torn grievously asunder by the efects of reification. In
knowing itself for what it is, the proletariat becomes both subject and object
of history. Indeed Lukacs occasionally seems to imply that ths act of self
consciousness is a revolutonary practce all in itsel
What Lukacs has in efect done here is to replace Hegel's Absolute Idea -
itself the identcal subject-object of history - with the proletariat.s Or at
least, to qualif the point, with the kind of politcally desirable consciousness
which the proletariat could in principle achieve - what he calls 'ascribed' or
'imputed' consciousness. And if Lukacs u Hegelian enough in this, he is
equally so i his tust that the tuth lies in the whole. Fr the Hegel of The
Phenomenolog ofSpir immediate experience is itself a kind of false or
partal consciousness; it will yield up its tuth only when it is dialectcally
mediated, when its latent manifold relatons with te whole have been
patently uncovered. One might say, then, that on ths ve our routne
consciousness is itself inherently 'ideological', simply by virre of it
partality. It is not that te statements we make in this siraton are
necessarily false; it is rater that they are tue ony in some superfcial,
empirical way. for they are judgements about isolated objects which have
not yet been incorporated into their full context. We can think bac here to
the asserton: 'Prince Charles is a thoughtful, conscientous fellow', which
may be true enough as far as it goes, but whic isolates the object known as
98
Prm Lukc t Gramc
Prince Charle from the whole
context of te instittion of royalty For
HegeL it is only by the operatons of dialectcal reason that such statc,
discrete phenomena can be reconsttuted as a dynamic, developin whole
A to t extent one might say that a certain kind of false consciousness
i
for Hegel our 'natural' conditon, endemic to our immediate experience.
For Lukacs, by contrast, such partial seeing springs from specifc histor
ical cause - the process of capitalst reifcaton - but is to be overcome in
much the same way, by the workins of a 'totalizing' or dialectcal reason.
Bourgeois science, logic and philosophy are hs equivalent of Hegel's
routine, unredeemed mode of knowledge, breakng down what is in fact a
complex, evolvng totalty into artfcially autonomous part. Ideology for
Lukacs is tus not exactly a discourse untue to te way things are, but one
true to them only in a limited, superfcial way, ignorant of their deeper
tendencies and connections. And this is another sense in which, contrary to
widespread opinion, ideology is not i his vew false consciousness in the
sense of simple error or illusion.
To seize hstory as totality is to grasp it in its dynamic, contadictory
development of whch the potental realiaton of human powers is a vt
part. To this extent, a particular kind of cognition - knowing te whole - is
for bot Hegel and Lukacs a certain kind of moral and politcal nonn The
dialectcal method thus reuntes not only subject and object but also 'fact'
and 'value', which bourgeois tought has ripped asunder. To understand te
world in a partcular way becomes inseparable from actg to promote the
fre, full unfolding of human creatve powers. We are not left high and dry,
as we are in positvst or empiricist thought, with a dispassionate, value-tee
knowledge on the one hand, and an arbitrary set of subjectve value on the
other. On the contrar, the act of knowledge is itelf both 'fact' and 'value',
an accurate cogton indispensable for politcal emancipation. A Leszek
Kolakowski put te point 'In dpartcular case [i.e. that of emancipatory
knowledge] the understanding and transfonnation of reality are not two
separate proceses, but one and the same phenomenon.'6
Lukacs's wrtngs on c consciousnes rank among the richet, most
original documents of twenteth-century Marxism. Tey are, nevertheless,
subject to a number of damaging critcsms. It could be argued, for eample,
that his theor of ideology tends towards an unoly mixture of economsm
and idealism. Economism, because he uncritically adopts the later Marx's
implicaton that the commodity form is somehow te secret esence of
ideological consciousness in bourgeois society. Reificaton fgures for Lukacs
99
Ideolog
not only a a cent featre of the capitalist economy, but a 'the cent
stct problem of capitlist society in all apect? A kind of essentalism
of ideology is consequently at work here, homogening what are in fact
very dif erent discourse, stuctures and efect. At its worst, tis model tends
to reduce bourgeois society to a set of neatly layered 'expressions' of reifca
ton, each of its levels (economic, politcal, juridical, phlosophcal)
obediently m and refect the oter. Moreover, as Teodor Adoro
wa later t sugget, tis single-minded insistence upon reifcaton as the
clue to al crimes is itself covertly idealist: in Lukacs's tet it tends to
diplace suc more fundamental concept as economic exploitaton. Muc
the same might be said of his use of te Hegelian categor of totality, which
sometmes pushe to one side an attenton to modes of production contra
dicton between the forces and relatons of producton and the lie. Is
Nm like Mattew Aold's ideal potc vision, just a mtter of seeing
reality steadiy and seeig it whole? To parody Lukcs's cae a litte: is
revoluton simply a queston of making connection? And is not the social
totalty, for Marism unot for Hegel, 'skewed' and asymmetical, twisted
out of tue by te preponderance witin it of economic determinat?
Properly cautous of 'vulgar' Marxist versions of 'base' and 'superstcture',
Lukacs wishes to displace attenton from this brand of mechanstc deter
msm to the idea of te social whole; but tis social whole ten risks
becoming a purely 'circular' one, in which each 'level' is granted equal
efectvit wt each of the oters.
Comoity fetshism. for Lukacs a much a for Marx, is an objectve
material stuctre of capitm. not just a state of mind. But in Hitor an
Clas Cnciounes another, residually ' idealist model of ideology is also
confusingly at work, whch would see to locate te 'essence' of bourgeOis
societ in the collectve subjectvity of te bourgeois clas itseI 'For a class
to be ripe for hegemony, Lukacs write, 'mean tat its interests and
conciousness enable it to organse the whole of societ in accordance with
those interest.'8 What is it, ten, whic provides te ideological lyncpin of
te bourgeois order? Is it the 'objective' system of commodit fetshism.
which presumably imprints itself on all classes alike, or the ,'subjectve'
stengt of te domt class's consciousness? Garet Stedman Jone has
argued that, as fr as the latter ve is concered, it is a though ideology for
Lukcs m gp trough 'te saturaton of te socal totality by the
ideologcal essence of a pure clas subject'9 What dsoverlooks, a Stedman
Jones goes on to point out, is tt ideologies, far from being te 'subjective
10
From Lukc to Gramsci
prouct of the "l to power" of diferent classe', are 'objective systems
detenined by te whole feld of social stuggle beteen contending classe'.
Fr Lukac, as for 'historicist' Marxism in general, it would sometmes
appear as tough each social class m in own peculiar, corporate 'world
vie', one direccly expresive of it Jaterial conditons of existence; and
ideological dominance then consist in one of these world viewS imposing
it stap on the social formaton a a whole. Ie is not ony chat this version of
ideological power is hard to square with te more stuctural and objectve
doctne of commodity fethsm; it is also chat it dratcally siplifes te
true unevenness and complexity of the ideological 'feld'. For as Nicos
Poulantas has argued, ideology, like social class itelf is an inherencly
relational phenomenon: it expresse les the way a class lives its conditons of
existence, can te way it lives them in relation to the lived eerence o other
clas esIO Just as there can be no bourgeois cas witout a proletiat or vice
vesa, so te typical ideology of each of these classes is consttuted to te root
b te ideology of it antgonist. Ruling ideologies, a we have argued
erlier, must engage efectvely with te lved experence of subordinate
classes; and te way in which those subalter classes live ter world will be
typically shaped and infuenced by te dominant ideologies. Historicist
Mm, in shore, presume to organic and inter a relaton between a
'clas subject' and its 'world view'. There are social classes such as te petty
bourgeoisie - 'contcton incarnate', as Marx dubbed them - whose
ideology is typically compounded of element drawn from the classes boch
above and below them; and there are vital ideological temes such as naton
asm whch do not 'belong' to any partcular social clas, but whic rater
provide a bone of contenton beteen them.1l Social classe do not manifest
ideologes in the way cat individuals display a partcular style of walng:
ideology is, rather, a complex, confictve feld of meaning, in which some
theme w be closely ted to the eperience of partcular classes, whe
ochers will be more 'fee foatng', tugged now this way and now cat in the
stgle between contending powers. Ideology is a realm of contestation and
negotation, in which there is a constant busy tfc: meangs and values
are stolen, tansformed, appropriated across the frontiers of diferent classes
and groups, surrendered, repossessed, reinfected. A dominant class may 'live
its experience' in part tough the ideology of a previous dominant one:
tin of the aristocratc colouring of the Englsh haut bou
r
eosie. Or it may
fhon its ideology partly in terms of te beliefs of a subordinated class - as
in the case of fscism, where a ruling sector of fnance capitalism tkes over
101
Ideolog
"
for its own purposes the prejudices and anietes of the lower middle class.
There is no neat, one-to-one correspondence beteen classes and ideologies,
as is eident i the case of revolutonary socialism. Any revolutonary
ideolog, to be politically efectve, would have to be a good deal more than
Lukac's 'pure' proletarian consciousness: unless it lent some provisional
coherence to a ric array of oppositonal forces, it would have scant chance
of success.
The idea of social classes as 'subjects', cental to Lukacs's work, has also
been contested. A class is not just some kind of collectvied individual,
equipped with the sorts of attributes ascribed by humanist thought to the
individual person: consciousness, unty, autonomy, self-determinaton and
so on. Classes are certainly for Marsm historical agent; but they are
stuctural, material formatons as well as 'intersubjectve' enttes, and the
problem is how to think these two aspects of them together. We have seen
already that ruling classes are generally complex, interally confictive
'blocs', rather than homogeneous bodies; and the same applies to their
politcal antagonsts. A 'class-ideology', then is likely to display much the
same kind of uneveness and contradictoriness.
Te harshest criticism of Lukacs's theory of ideolog would be that, in a
series of progressive conatons, he collapses Marxist theory into proletarian
ideology; ideolog into the expression of some 'pure' class subject; and ths
class subject to the essence of the social formaton. But ts case demands
signifcant qualifcation. Lukacs is not at all blind to the ways in which the
consciousness of the working class is 'contaminated' by that of its rulers, and
would seem to ascribe no organic 'world view' to it in non-revolutionary
conditons. Indeed if the proletariat i its 'normal' state is little more than
the commodity incarate, it is hard to see how it can be subject at all - and
therefore hard to see how exactly it can make the transiton to becoming a
'class for itself. But ths process of 'contamnation' does not appear to work
the other way round, in the sense that the dominant ideology seems in no way
signfcantly shaped by a dialogue with its subordinates.
We have seen already that there are really to discrepant theories of
ideolog at work in Histor and ClasConsciousnes - the one deriving from
commodity fetishism, the other from a historcist view of ideology as te
world view of a class subject. A far as the proletariat is concered, these to
conceptions would seem to correspond respectvely to it 'normal' and
revolutionary states of being. In non-revolutonary conditions, working
class consciousness is passively subject to the efects of reifcation; we are
102
Frm Lukc to Gramci
given no clue a to how this situaton is actvely contitutd by proletarian
ideology, or of how it intercts with less obediently submissive aspects of
that experience. How does the worker conttute herself as a subject on the
basis of her objectcaton? But when the class st - mysteriously - to
becoming a revolutionary subject, a historicist problematc takes over, and
what was tue of teir rulers - that they 'saturated' the whole social forma
ton with their own ideological conceptons - can now become tue of tem
too. What is said of tese rulers, however, is inconsistent for d active
notion of ideoloy in their case is at odds with the view that they, to, are
simply victms of te structre of commodity fetshism. How can the
middle class gover by virtue of its unique, unifed world view when it is
simply subjected along with other clases to the stucture of reifcaton? Is
the dominant ideology a matter of the bourgeoisie, or of bourgeois society?
It can be claimed tat Histor and Clas Coniousnes is marred by a
typically idealist overetmaton of 'conciousness' itel 'Ony the
conciousnes of the proletariat', Lukcs writes, 'can point to the way that
leads out of the impasse of capitalism';12 and whe this is ortodox enough
in one sene, since an unconscious proletariat is hardly likely to do the tc
it emphasis is noneteless revealing. Fr it is not in the frst place te
conciousnes of the working class, actual or potental, which leads Marxism to
select it as the prime agency of revolutonary cange. If the working class
fgures as suc an agent, it is for stuctural, material reason - the fact that it
is the only body so located witn the productve proces of capitalism, so
tined and organed by that process and utterly indispenable to it, as to be
capable of taking it over. In this sense it is capitalism, not Marism, whic
'select' the instruments of revolutonary overthrow, patently nurturing it
own potental gravedigger. When Lukacs obseres that the stength of a
social formaton is always in the last resort a 'spirital' one, or when he
writes that 'the fate of the revolution . . . will depend on the ideologcal
maturity of the proletariat, i.e. on it cass consciousness','3 he i arguably in
danger of displacing thee material issues into queston of pure concious
ness - and a consciousness which, as Gareth Stedman Jone has pointed out,
remains curiously disembodied and ethereal, a matter of 'ideas' rather t
practces or instittons.
If Lukacs is residually idealist in the hgh priority he assigns to conscious
ness, so is he also in his Romantc hostility to science. logic and technology.14
Frmal and analytc discourses are simply modes of bourgeois reifcaton,
just as all form of mecaton and ratonaliation would seem inerently
103
Ideolo
alienatng. Te progesive, emancpatory side of tee procese in te
history of capitlism is merely ignored. in an elegaic nostalga typical of
Romantc conservatve thought. Lukacs does not wsh to deny that Marism
is a scence; but this science is the 'ideological expression of the proletariat,
not some set of tmeless analytc propositon. certy ofer a
powerfl challene to te 'scientsm' of the Second Intematonal - the belief
that hstorical materialism is a purely objectve knowledge of the immanent
laws of historcal development. But to react against such metphysical
fantie by reducing Marxist teory to revolutonary ideolo is hardly more
adequate. Are the complex equatons of Ca
p
itl no more than a theoretcal
'expresion' of socialist conscousness? Is not that consciousness partly
contitutd by such theoretcal labour? And i only proletaran self-conscious
nes will delver us te tuth, how do we come to accept tis tt as tue in
the frst place, i not by a cern teoretcal understnding whic must be
relatvely independent of it?
I have already argued that it is mistakn to see Lukac as equatng
ideolo wit fase conciousnes (ut cour Working-lass socalist ideology
i not of course in mve false; and even boureois ideology is illusory ony
in a comple sene of the term. Indeed we migt claim that whereas for the
early Mar and Engels, ideolog is tought false to the true sitaton, for
Lukacs it is tought tue to a false situaton. Bourgeois ideas do indeed
accurately mrror the state of t in bourgeois society; but it is this very
state of afairs which is somehow tsted out of tue. Suc consciousness u
faitful to the rewed nature of the capitalist social order, and often enough
m te claim about this conditon; it is 'false' i so fr as it canot
penette d world of fozen appearance to lay bare the totalit of
tendencies and connectons which underlies it. In the breathtakg cental
secton of Hior and ClasConscious 'Reifcation and te Consciousness
of te Proletariat', Lukacs boldly rewrites the whole of post-Kntan
philosophy as a secret history of the commodity form, of te scism beteen
empty subjects and petifed object; and in this sense such thought is
accurate to the domiant social categories of capitlist socet, stuctured by
them to its root. Bourgeois ideology is false les because it distorts, ivert
or denies the material world, t because it i unable to press beond
certn limits stctural to bourgeois societ as such A Lukacs write: 'u
the barrier which convert the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie into
"false" conciounes is objectve: it is the class situaton itel It is te
objectve result of the economc set-up, and is neither arbitary, subjectve
l01
Frm Lukc t Grami
nor pscological.'15 We have here, then, yet anoter defniton of ideolog,
as 'structurally constained thought', which run back at least as far as Mar'
s
Te Eihteenth Brmair
e
o Louis Bona
p
are. In a discussion in that text of what
make certai Frenc politcians representatves of te petty bourgeoisie,
Ma comments that it is 'the fact that in teir minds they do not get
beyond te limits which the [ett bourgeoisie] does not get beyond in life'.
False consciousnes u tus a kind of thought whch fmds itselfbafed and
twarted by certain barriers in society rather than in the mind; and only by
tnsformng society itelf could it therefore be dissolved.
One can put ths point in another way. There are certain kinds of error
whch result simply fom lapses of intelligence or informaton, and which
can be resolved by a furter refnement of thought. But when we keep
running up agaist a limit to our conceptions whic stubbory refuses to
give way, then tis obstuction may be symptomatic of some 'limit' built
into our social life. In ths situaton, no amount of intelligence or ingenuity,
no mere 'evoluton of ideas', wll sere to get us further forard, for what is
awry here i the whole cast and fame of our consciousness, conditoned a it
is by certain material contraint. Our soial practces pose the obstacle to
the very ideas which seek to explain them; and if we want to advance those
ides. we will have to change our forms of life. It is precisely this which Ma
argues of the bourgeois politcal economists, whose searchng theoretical
enquiries fnd themselves contnually rebuffed by problems which mark the
inscrpton on the interior of their discourse of the social conditons
surrounding it
It is thus that Lukacs can write of bourgeois ideoloy as 'sometng
which i subjectively justfed in te social and historical situaton, as some
t which can and should be understood, i.e. as "right". At the same tme,
objectively it by-passe the essence of the eoluton of socety and fails to
pinpoint and epress it adequately.'16 Ideology is now a long way fom being
some mere illusion; and the same is te if one reverses these terms 'objec
tive' and 'subjectve'. Fr one might equally claim, so Lukacs remarks, that
bourgeois ideology fls 'subjectvely' to aceve it self-appointed goals
(freedom, justce and so on), but exactly in so failing helps to further certain
objectve of which it is ignorant. By which he means, presumably,
helping to promote the hstorical conditons whch w fmally bring
soialism to power. Such class consciousness involves an unconsciousness of
one's tue social conditon and is thus a kind of self-decepton; but wherea
Enels. as we have seen, tended to dismiss the conscious motvaton involved
105
Ideolog
here as sheer illusion, Lukacs is prepared t accord it certain limted truth.
'Despite all its objective falseness', he writes, 'the self-deceiving "false"
consciousness that we fnd in the bourgeoisie is at least in accord with its
class situaton:!7 Bourgeois ideology may be false from the standpoint of
some putatve social totality, but tis does not mean that it is false to the
sitation as it currently is.
This way of purng the point may perhaps help to make some sense of
te otherwise puzzling notion of ideology as thought tue to a false situa
tion. Fr what seems spurous about this formulation is te very idea that a
situation mght be said to be false. Statements about deep-sea diving may be
te or false, but not deep-sea diving itsel A a Marst humanise however,
Lukacs hmself has a kind of answer to ths problem. A 'false' sitaton for
him is one in which the human 'essence' - te full potental of those powers
which humanty has historically developed - is being unnecessarly blocked
and estranged; and such judgements are thus always made from the stand
point of some possible and desirable future. A false situation can b
identifed only subjunctively or retrospectively, from te vantage-point of
what might be possible were these thwarting, alienating forces to be
abolished. But ths does not mean taking one's stand in the empty space of
some speculative future, in the manner of 'bad' utopianism; for in Lukacs's
ve, and indeed in the view of Marsm in general, te outline of that
desirable futre can already be detected in certain potentalites strring
within the present. The present is thus not identcal with itself there is tat
within it which points beyond it, as indeed the shape of every historical
present is stuctured by its anticipation of a possible future.
If the critique of ideology sets OUt to examine the social foundatons of
thought. then it must logically be able to give some account of its own
hstorical origins. What was the material history which gave rise to the
notion of ideology itself Can the study of ideology round upon its own
conditons of possibility?
Te concept of ideology, it can be argued, arose at the hstorical point
where systems of ideas frst became aware of their own partiality; and this
came about when tose ideas were forced to encounter alien or alternatve
fons of discourse. It was with the rise of boureois society, above all, that
te scene was set for this occurrence. For it is characteristic of that society, as
Mar noted, that everythng about it, including its forms of consciousness, is
in a state of ceaseless fux, in contrast to some more traditon-bound social
106
Frm Lukc r Gram
order. Capitalism surives ony by a resrless development of te productve
forces; and in tis agtated social condition new ideas tumble upon one
another's heels as dizzyingly as do fashons in commoites. The entenche
authority of any sinle world view is accordingly underined by te very
nacre of capitalsm itself Moreover, such a social order breeds plurality and
fgmentation as surely as it generates social deprivation. transgressing tme
halowed boundaries between diverse forms of lfe and pitching tem
together in a mele of idioms, ethnc origns, life-styles, natonal cultures. It is
exacrly this which the Soviet critc Mikhail Bakhtn means by 'polyhony'.
Withn this atomized space, marked by a proliferating divsion of in
tellectual labour, a variety of creeds, doctrines and modes of perception
josde for authort and this thought should give pause to those posrodem
theorist for whom diference, plurality and heterogeneity are unequivocally
'progressive'. Witn ts turmoil of competng creeds, any partcular belief
system will fnd itelf wedged cheek by jowl with unwelcome compettors;
and its own fronters will thus be thrown into sharp rele Te stage is then
set for the gowth of phlosophcal scepticism and relatvism - for te
convicton that, within the unseemly hubbub of the intellectual market
place, no single way of thinking can claim more validity than any other. If all
thought is partal and partisan. then all thought is 'ideological'.
In a stng paradox, ten, te very dynamism and mutability of the
capitalist system threaten to cut the authoritative ground from under its
own feer and this uperhaps most obvious in the phenomenon of imperial
ism. Imperialsm needs to assert the absolute tth of its own values at
exacdy the point where tose values are confrontng alien cultre; and ts
can prove a notably disorientatng experience. It is hard to remain convinced
that your own way of doing things is the ony possible one when you are
busy tying to subjugate another society which conduct its afairs in a
radically diferent but apparently efectve way. Te fcton of Joseph
Conrad turns on this disabling contradicton. In this as in other ways, then,
the hstorical emergence of the concept of ideology testfes to a corrosive
aniety - to the embarassed awareness that your own tt ony strke you
as plausible because of where you happen to be standing at the rime.
The modern bourgeoisie is accordingly caught in somet of a cleft
stck. Unable to reteat to old-style metaphysical certintes, it is equally
loath to embrace a full-blooded sceptcism whch would simply subver the
legitmacy of its power. One early twenteth-century attempt to negotate
d dilemma is KH Mannheim's Ideolog and Utopia (1929), written under
107
Ieolog
the iuence of Lics's hstoricsm i te poltca tumult of the We
republic. Manheim sees well enough tat with the rise of mddles
soiety the old monological world view of te taditonal order ha dis
appeared forever. A authoritrian priestly and politca cate, whic once
confdently monopolised knowledge, m now yielded ground to a 'fee'
intllgentia caught on te hop beteen confctng theoretcal perspec
tves. The a of a 'sociology of knowledge' w tus be to spurn
tndentl tuts and examine the social detert of partcular
blief systems whe guardig at the same tme agait the diabling
relatvm whic would level al these belefs to one. Te problem, as
Mannheim is uneaily aware, is that any critcism of another's views as ideo
logcal is always susceptble to a swift tu quoque. In pulling the rug out fom
bneath one's itellectal antagonst. one is always in danger of pullig it
out fom beneath oneeI
Agat suc relatvism. Manheim speaks up for what he cals 'relaton
ism', menng the locton ofidea witin the soial system which gives birth
to them. Such an enquiry ito the social basis of thought, he considers, need
not run counter to te goal of objectvity for though ideas are internally
shped by their soal origi, their tuth value i not reducible to them. The
ievitble one-sidednes of any partcular standpoit can be corrected by
synthesiing it with its rivals, thus buidig up a provisional, dynamic
totality of tougt. At the same tme, by a process of self-monitoring, we can
come to appreciate te limits of our own perspectve, and so atn a
retcted sort of objectvity. Man e thus emerges a the Matthew
Aold of We Germany, concered to see life steadily and see it whole.
Bliered ideologcal viewpoints w be patenty subsumed into some
greater totlity by those dispasionate enough to do so . whic is to say, by
'fee' itellectuals wth a remarkable resemblance to Karl Mannheim. The
only problem with tis approach is tat it merely pushes the queston of
relatvism back a stag; for we can always ask about the tendentous
standpoint from which this synthesis is actually launched. Isn't the interest in
totlity just another interest?
Suc a sociology of knowledge is for Manneim a welcome alteratve to
the older style of ideology critque. Such critque, in his view, is essentally a
matter of unmaking one's antgonist's notons, exposing them as lies,
deceptons or illusions fuelled by conscious or unconscious social motva
tons. Ideology critque, in short, is here reduced to what Pau Ricoeur would
call a 'hermeneutc of suspicon', and is plainly inadequate for the subtler,
10
From Lukc to Gramci
more ambitous tak of elictg te whole 'mental structure' whch
underlies a group's prejudices belief. Ideology pertains only to specfc
deceptve asserton, whose roots, so Mannheim at one point argues, may be
traced to the psychology of partcular individuals. That this is sometng of a
staw target of ideology is surely clear Mannheim pays scant regard to suc
theories as the fetshsm of commodites, where decepton, far from
springing fom psychologistc sources, is seen as generated by an entre social
stuctre.
Te ideological function of the 'sociology of knowledge' is in fact to
defuse the whole Marist conception of ideology, replacing it with the less
embattled, contentous concepton of a 'orld view'. Mannheim, to be sure,
does not believe that such world views can ever be non-evaluatvely
analysed; but the drift of his work is to downplay concepts of mystfcaton,
rationalizaton and the power-function of ideas in the name of some
synoptc survey of the evoluton of forms of hstorical consciousness. In a
sense, ten, this post-Marxist approach to ideology returs to a pre-Marxist
view of it as simply 'socially determned thought'. And since this applies to
any thought whatsoever, tere is a danger of the concept of idelogy
canceling all the way through.
In so far as Mannhei doe retain te concept of ideology, he does so in a
singularly unl umatng way. A a hstorcist, tut for Mannheim mean
ideas adequate to a partcular stage of historical development; and ideology
then signifies a body of beliefs incongruous wth its epoch, out of sync wit
what the age demands. Conversely, 'utopia' denotes ideas ahead of their tme
and so simarly discrepant with social reality, but capable nonetheless of
shattering the stctres of che present and tansgressing its frontiers.
Ideology, i short, is antquated belief a set of obsolescent myths, norms and
ideals unnged fom the real: utopia is premature and uneal, but should be
reserved as a term for those conceptal prefigurations whch really do
succeed in realizing a new social order. Ideology emerges i this light as a
kind of failed utopia, unable to enter upon material existence; and cis
defton of it then simply throws us bac to the patently insufcient early
Marxian noton of ideology as inefectual ocherworldiness. Mannheim
would appear to lack all sense of ideologies as forms of consciousness often
all too well adapted to current social requirements, productively entned
wt hstorical reality, able to organize practc soial actvity i highly
efectve ways. In hs denigration of utopia, which is simlarly a 'distorton of
reality', he is simply blnded to the ways i whic what 'the age demands'
109
Ieolog
may be precisely a tought which moves beyond it. 'ought', he remarks,
'should contain neither less nor more than the reality in whose medium it
operates'18 - an identfcaton of the concept wit its object which Theodor
Adorno, ironically enough, will denounce as the very essence of ideologcal
thought.
.
In the end, Mannheim either stretches te term ideology beyond all
serviceable use, equating it with the social determinaton of any belief
whatoever, or unduly narrows it to specifc acts of deceptiolL He fails to
grasp that ideology cannot be synonymous with partal or perspectival
thinking - for of what thinking is ths not true? If the concept is not to be
entrely vacuous it must have rather more specifc connotations of power
struggle and legitimaton, structural dissemblance and mystifcaton. What
he does usefully suggest, however, is a third way between those who would
hold that the truth or falsity of statement is sublimely untainted by their
social genesis, and tose who would abruptly reduce the former to the latter.
\or Micel Fucault, it would seem that the truth value of a propositon is
I entrely a matter of its social function, a refex of the power interests it
promotes. A the linguists might say, what is enunciated is wholly collapsible
to the conditions of the enunciation; what matters is not so much what is
said, but who says it to whom for what purposes. What tis overlooks is that,
while enunciations are certainly not independent of their social conditions, a
statement such as 'Eskimos are generally speaking just as good as anyone
else' is true no matter who says it for what end; and one of the impotant
features of a claim such as 'Men are superior to women' is that, what
ever power interests it may be promotng. it is also, as a matter of fact,
false.
Aother tinker on whom the Lukacsian mantle descends is te
Romanian-bor sociologist Lucien Goldmann. Goldman's method of
'genetic structuralism' seeks to identf the 'mental structures' of a particular
social group or class, especially as tese are revealed in literature and
philosophy. Everyday consciousness is a haphazard, amorphous afair but
certain exceptonally gifted members of a class - artsts, for example - can
rise above ths med, uneven experience and express te class's interests in
purer, more diagrammatic form. This 'ideal' structure Goldmann names a
'world view' - a specifc organzaton of mentl categories whch silently
informs the art and thought of a social group, and which is the product ofits
collective consciousness. Te Goldmannian world view is thus a version of
Lukacs's 'imputed' consciousness: that style of thought at whch a social class
110
Frm Lukc t Gramc
would ideally arrive were it to
grsp it real situaton and artculate it true
aspirations.
Goldmann enforces a distinction beteen this world view and mere
ideolog. 1e former is gobal in reach, and typifies a social class at te
height of its powers, whereas the latter is a partal, distortng perspectve
characteristc of a class in decline. 1ere is some warrant for t opposition,
as we have seen, in a certain reading of Mar. who contrast the genuine
unversality of an emergent revolutionary class wit te deceptive ratonal
izations of its subsequent career. All the same, the distincton would seem
somewhat shaky: is a world view non-ideological in te sense of being
innocent of power? Is there no sense in which it strives to legtimate
particular social interests? It is as though Goldmann wishes to safeguard te
'purity' of the world view fom the shame of the sheerly ideological; and one
reason he needs to do so is because the totty of the world view, for mas
for Lukacs, ofers a vantage-point other than te now discredited 'science'
from whch specifc ideologies may be assessed. Ts is not to claim that
every world view is 'tue'; for Goldmann, the Kntian vision is tagically
constrained by the categories of bourgeois society. But it is true to actual
historical conditions, and so to be contrasted with the mere speciousness of
an ideology. World view is ideology purifed, elevated, and largely purged of
its negative elements.
In his major work Te Hidde God (1955), Goldmann examines the tragic
world view of a sector of the seventeenth-entry French bourgeoisie,
demonstrating how the works of writers as apparently disparate as Racine
and Pascal display an invariable 'deep' structre of categories expressive of
the vain search for absolute value in a world now stripped of numinous
meaning by scientifc rationalism and empiricism. All of the elements of
'hstoricist' Marism are clearly in evidence here. Social classes are viewed
not primarily as objective material stuctures but as 'collective subject',
furnished with what - ideally, at least - is a highy homogeneous conscious
nes. This conciousness srnds in directly expressive relation to the class's
soial conditions; and works of art and philosophy are in tm expressive of
ts world view. There is no partcular room in this model for 'non-lass'
forms of consciousness, and lttle room either for any serious complcatons,
dislocatons or contdictons between it various levels. 1he social forma
tion presents itself as an 'expressive totalit', within which social conditions,
clas, world view and literar artefacts unproblemaccally refect one
another.
111
Idolog
In hs later work Toard a Soiolo othe Novel (1964), Gldmn tr
fom the concept of world view to te theory of reifcation. Ths
methoolocal shift. he considers, rects a real mutaton fom classical to
advanced cpitam; for the later ste of the system, with the peraive
ratonaliing and dehumaniing of existence. have now defnitvely blocked
of te possibility of global totty at te level of consciousness. What ts
sugests is that the noton of world view, and the theory of commodity
fetshism, can ot really coexist a account of ideolog. If a we have seen,
they stnd in uneasy interrelaton i the work of Lukacs. tey divide into
cronologically successive phases of the history of capitalism in the writs
of Goldmann. So the queston whch we rased in the case of Lukacs returns
in the istance of his disciple: is the dominant ideology a matter of the
r class somehow iposin its coherently organied consciousnes upon
soiety a a whole or is it a matter of te material stctures of te capitst
economy itself
Te key ctegory i the writng of Lukacs's Wester Marxist colleague
Antono Gramsci is not ideolog but hegemony; and it is worth pondering te
distncton between these two tens. Gramsci normally uses the word
,hegemony to mean the ways in which a governg power win consent to its
rue fom tose it subjugates - though it is tue tat he occasionally uses the
tenn to cover both consent and coercion together. There is rus a
immediate diference from te concept of ideology, since it is ce tat
ideologie may be forcbly imposed. T for example, of the workngs of
rcist ideology i South Mrc But hegemony is also a broader category
than ideolo: it inlude ideolog, but is not reducible to it A rul group
or class may secure consent to it power by ideological means; but it may
also do so by. say, altering the tax system i ways favourable to groups whose
support it ne or creat a layer of relatvely afuent. and thus somewhat
politcally quiescent. workers. Or hegemony may tke political rather than
economc forms: the parliamentry system in Wester democracies i a
crucal apect of such power. mo it fosters te illusion of self-goverent
on the pa of te populace. What uniquely distguishes te politcal fonn
of suc societes i that the people are supposed to believe that they gover
temselves, a belief which no slave of antquity or medieval serf was
expected to enterain. Indeed Perr Anderson goes so far as to describe the
parliamentry system as 'the hub of the ideological apparatus of capitalism'.
to whic suc inttutons as the media, curces and politcal partes play a
112
From Lukc t Gramsi
critcal but complementary role. It is for tis reason, as Anderson points out,
tat Gramsc is mstken when he locates hegemony in 'civl society' alone
rather than in the state, for the politcal form of the capitalist state is itself a
vital organ of suc power.l
Another powerfl source of politcal hegemony is the supposed
neutality of the bourgeois state. Th is not, in fact, simply an ideological
illusion. In capitlist socety. politcal power is indeed relatvely autonomous
of social and economic life, as opposed to the politcal set-up in pre
capitalist formatons. In feudal regme. for example, the nobility who
eonomically exploit the peasanty also exercise certain politcal, cultural
and juridical fnctons in their lives. so that te relaton between economic
and political power is here more visible. Under capitalism. economic life is
not subject to such contnuous politcal superision: as M coments, it is
the 'dull compulsion of the economc', the need simply to survve, which
keeps men and women at work, divorced from any framework of politcal
obligatons religous sanctons or customary responibite. It is as though
in d form of le the economy come to operate ' by itelf. and the
politcal state can thus take someting of a back set, sustaining the general
structres withn whc t economc actvity is conducted. Tis is te real
material basis of the belief that the bourgeois state is supremely dis
interested. holdig te ring beteen contending socal forces; and in ths
sense, once again, hegemony is built into it very natre.
Hegemony, then is not just some succesful kind of ideology, but may be
disted into its various ideologica, cultral, politcal and economic
apects. Ideology refers specifcally to the way power-struggles are fought
out at the level of signfcaton; and though suc signicaton is involved in
all hegemonic processes, it is not i alcae the dominant level by whc rule
is sustained. Singing the Natonal Anthem comes as cloe to a 'purely'
ideological actvity a one could imagine; it would certnly seem to fulfl no
other purpose, aside perhaps fom annoying the neighbours. Religion,
similarly, is probably the most purely ideological of the various instttons
of civil society. But hegemony is also carried in cultural, politcal and
economic forms - in non-discursive practces as well as i rhetorical
uterances.
With certain notble inconsistencies, Gramsci associates hegemony with
the arena of'cvil society', by which he means the whole range of insttUtons
intermediate beteen state and economy. Privately owned television
staton, the famiy, the boy scout movement, the Methodist curch, infant
IL
Ideolog
schools, the Britsh Legion, the Sun newspaper: all of tese would count a
hegemonic apparatuses, whic bind indivduals to the ruling power by
consent rather than by coercion. Coercion, by contrast, is resered to the
state, whic has a monopoly on 'legitimate' violence. (e should note,
however, that the coercive institutons of a society - armes, law courts and
the rest - must themselve win a general consent from the people if they are
to operate efectively, so that the oppositon beteen coercion and consent
can be to some extent deconsrructed.) In modern capitalist regimes, civil
society has come to assume a formidable power, in contrast to the days when
te Bolshevks, living in a society poor in such insttutions, could seie te
reins of government by a frontal attack on the state itself The concept of
hegemony tus belongs wit te queston: How i the working class to take
power in a social fonnation where the domnant power usubtly, pervasively
diffused throughout habitual daily practices, intmately interwoven wit
'cultr' itself inscribed in the very texture of our experience from nursery
school to funerl parlour? How do we combat a power which has become
te 'common sense' of a whole social order, rater than one which uwidely
perceived as alien and oppressive?
In modern society, then, it is not enough to occupy factories or confront
the state. What must also be contested :sthe whole area of 'culture', defned
in its broadest, most everyday sense. The power of te ruling class is spiritual
as well as material; and any 'counterhegemony' must carry it politcal
campaign into this hitherto neglected realm of values and customs, speech
habits and ritual practices. Perhaps te shrewdest comment ever pased on
this topic was Lenn's, in a speec to the Moscow conerence of trade unions
in 1918:
The whole difculty of the Russian revoluton is that it was much easier
for the Russian revolutonary workng class to star than it is for the Wet
European clases, but it is much more difcult for us to contnue. It is
more difcult to star a roluton in West Euro
p
ean counte because
there the revolutonary proletariat is opposed by the higher thinng
that comes with culrure, while the working class is in a state of clta
slaver.2o
What Lenin means is that the relative lack of 'culture' in Tsarist Russia, in
te sense of a dense network of 'civil' insttutons, was a key factor in making
the revoluton possible, since the ruli class could not secure its hegemony
114
From Lukc t Gramci
by thee means. But the very same absence of cUlture, i the sene of a
literate, well-educated populaton, developed tecoloical force and so on,
also plunged the revoluton into grve problems a son a it occured.
Conversely, it is the preponderance of culture in the West, i the sense of a
complex array of hegemonc insttutons i civil socety, whic makes
politcal revolution difcult to inaugurate; but this same cultre, in the
sense of a society rich in teccal, material and 'spiritual' reources, would
make politcal revoluton eaier to sustain once it came about. Ts i
perhaps the place to remark tat for Lenin, as indeed for all Marxist thinkers
up to Stalin, socialism was inconceivable without a hig level of develop
ment of the productve forces, and more generally of ' culture'. Marsm was
never intended to be a theory and practce of how desperately backward
societies could leap, isolated and unaided, into te tentet centry and
the materl consequence of such an attempt is generally know a
Stlinism.
If the concept of hegemony extends and enriches the noton of ideology,
it also lends ts otherwise somewhat abstact term a material body and
politcal cuttng edge. It uwith Gramsci that the crucial transition is efected
from ideology as 'systems of ideas' to ideology as lived, habital socal
practce - which must then presumably encompass the unconscious, in
articulate dimensions of social experence as well as the workings of formal
institution. Louis Athusser, for whom ideology is largely unconscious and
always insttutonal, will inherit both of these emphaes; and hegemony a a
'lived' process of political dominaton comes close in some of n aspects to
what Rymond William calls a 'structure of feelng'. mhs own discussion
of Gramsc Williams acnowledges the dyamic caracter of hegemony, a
against the potentally statc connotatons of 'ideology': hegemony is never a
once-and-for-all achievement, but 'ha contnually to b renewed, recreted,
defended, and modifed'.21 A a concept, then, hegemony i inseparable fom
overtones of struggle, as ideology perhaps is not No single mode of
hegemony, so William argues, can exhaust the meanings and values of any
soiety and any governg power is thus forced to egage with counter
heemonic forces in ways which prove partly conttutve of it own rule.
Hegemony is thus an inherently relatonl, a well a practcal and dynamic,
noton; ad it ofers in tis sense a signal advance on some of the more
ossifed, scolastc defniton of ideology to be found in certain 'vulgar'
curents of Marxism.
Very roughly, then, we might defne hegemony a a whole range of
115
Ieolo
practcal stateges by whic a domit power elicit consent to it rule
fom tose its subjugates. Towin hegemony, in Gramsci's view, i to establish
moral, politcal and intellectual leadership in socal life by difusing one's
ow 'world view' trougout the fabric of soiety as a whole, thus equat
one's own interet with the interest of soiety at large. Suc conensual rle
is not of course, peculiar to capitalm; indeed one might claim tat any
for of politcal power, to b durable and well-ounded, must evoke at
least a degree of conent fom its underligs. But there are good reaons to
bleve tat in capitalt socety in partcular, the rato beteen conent and
corcon st decisively towards te former. I such conditon, the power
of te state to disciplie and punish - what Gramsci terms 'dominaton' -
remai frmly in place, and indeed in modem societes gows more
formidable as the various tecologes of oppression begn to proliferate.
But te ittutons of ' civi society' - scools, fmiies, curces, media and
the rest - now play a more cental role in te proesses of social contol. The
burgeois state wresort to direct violence if it is forced to it but in doing
so it msuferg a drastc loss of ideologcal credibility. It i preferable on
te whole for power to remain conveniendy invisible, disseminated
troughout te texture of social life and thus 'naturalized' as custom, habit
spontneous practce. Once power nakedly reveals its hand, it can become an
object of politcl contestton.22
A shift from coercon to consent is implicit in te very material condi
tons of middle-class soety. Sice that society is composed of ' fee', appar
endy autonomous idividuals, pursuig their own private iterests, any
cented politcal superision of these atomized subject becomes con
siderably harder to sustin Eac of them must consequendy become hs or
her own seat of sef-goverent eac must 'iterlize' power, mke it
spontaneously their own and bear it around with them as a principle
inseparble from their identites. A soial order must be constcte,
Gm wrtes, 'in whc the individual can govern himself without h
self-government tereby entering into conict wit politcal society - but
rather bcomng its normal contnuaton, its organic complement'.2l 'State
life', he adds, must become 'spontaneous', atone with the individual subject'S
'fee' identty; and i t is the 'psychologcal' dimenion of hegemony, it i
one wit a sold material basis i mddle-lass life.
I hs Pron Notbook Gracci rejects out of had any purely negatve
use of te term ideology. Tis 'bad' sense of te term m become wide
spread, he remaks, 'with the efect tat the theoretcal analysis of the
116
From Lukc t Gramsci
concept of ideology mbeen modifed and denatured'.24 Ideology
bbeen
too often seen as pure appearance or mere obtuseness, whereas a distnction
must in fact be drawn beteen 'historically organic' ideologies - meaning
those necessar to a given social stucture - and ideology i the sense of the
arbitary speculatons of individuals. J parallels to some extent the
oppositon we have obsered elsewhere beteen 'ideology' and 'world view',
tough we should note that for M hielf the negatve sense of ideology
was by no means confned to arbitary subjectve speculation. Gramsci also
dismsses any economstc reducton of ideology to the mere bad dream of
the itrcture: on the contrary, ideologies must be viewed as actvely
organing forces which are psycologically 'valid', fashioning the terrain on
which men and women act, struggle and acquire consciousness of their
social positions. In any 'historical bloc', Gramsci comments, material forces
are the 'content', and ideologies the 'form'.
Th Geran Ieolog's equaton of ideology with speculatve illusion is for
Gramsc simply one historically determinate phase tough whch such
ideologies pass: every concepton of te world, he obseres, might at some
point come to assume a-speculatve form which represents at once its histor
ical highpoint and the beginnng of it dissoluton
One could say, that is, that eer culture has it speclatve and religious
moment which coincides with the period of complete hegemony of the
social group of which it is the expression and perhaps coincides exactly with
the moment in which the real hegemony disintegrate at the bae, molecu
larly but precisely because of ts disintegration, and to react againt it, the
system of thought perfects itself a a dogma and become a transcendental
'fith'.lS
What mearly Mr and Engels are tempted to see as te eternal form of al
ideology is for Grsci a specifc historical phenomenon.
Gramsci's theory of ideology, ten, is cast like Lukacs's in what is known
a te 'historicist' mould. He i as suspicious a Lukacs of any appeal to a
'scientifc' Marism whch ignores the practcal, politcal, historically relatve
nature of Marxist theory, and grasps tat theory as the expression of revolu
tonary workin-class consciousness. A 'organic' ideology is not simply
false consciousness, but one adequate to a specifc stage of historical
development and a partcular poltcal moment. To judge the whole of pat
philosophy as mere 'deliium and foly', i the manner of 'vulgar' Marsm,
117
Ieolog
is an anachronistc error which assumes that men and women in the past
should have thought a we do today. But it is also, ironically, a hangover
from the metaphysical dogma of that pat, presupposing as it does an
eterly valid form of thought by whic all ages can be judged. The fact
that theoretcal systems have been superseded does not mean tat they were
not once historically valid. Marxism is simply the form of historical
consciousness adequate to the present moment, and will wither away when
tat moment is in it tm surpassed. If it seizes hold of historical contadic
tons, it also grasps itself as one element of those contradictons, and indeed
is teir most complete. because most conscious. expression. Fr Marism to
assert that every supposedly eteral truth has practcal historical origins i
inevitbly for it to tur this perspectve upon itself When ths fails to
happen, Marism itself rapidly petrifes into a metphysical ideology.
For Gramsci, te consciousness of subordinated groups in society is
typically fssured and uneven Two confictng conceptons of the world
usually exist in such ideologie, the one drawn from the 'ofcial' notons of
te rulers, the other derived from an oppressed people's practcal experience
of social reality. Suc confcts might rke te form of what we have seen
earler as a 'performatve contadicton' beteen what a group or class says,
and what it tacitly reveals in its behaviour. But this is not to be seen as mere
self-deception: such an explanaton, Gramsci thinks, might be adequate in
te case of partcular individuals, but not in the case of great mases of men
and women. These contradictions in thought must have an hstorical bae;
and Gramsci locates tis in the contrast between the emergent concept of the
world whch a class displays when it acts as an 'organic totality'. and its
submssion in more 'normal' times to the ideas of tose who govern uOne
aim of revolutionary practice, then, must be to elaborate and make explicit
the potentlly creatve principles implicit in the practcal understading of
the oppressed - to raise these otherwise inchoate, ambiguous elements of it
experience to te status of a coherent philosophy or 'world view'.
What is at stake here. to put the matter in Lukacs's terms, is a transiton
from te 'empirical' consciousness of the working clas to its 'possible'
consciousness - to te world view it could attain in propitous conditons,
and which is even now implicit in its experience. But whereas Lukacs is
disturbingly vage about how such a transition is to come about, Gramsci
ofers a hghly precise answer to this queston: the actvity of the 'organc'
intellectuals. 'Organic' intellectuals, of whom Gramsci himself was one, are
the product of a emergent social class; and their role is to lend that class
118
Frm Lukc t Grami
some homogeneous self-onsciousness in the cultural, politcal and
economc felds. The category of organic intellectual thus spans not only
ideologues ad philosopher but politcal actvist. industial technic
politcal economst, legal specialists and so on. Such a fgure is less a
contemplative thner, i te old idealist style of the intelligentia, uan
organizer, constructor, 'permanent persuader', who actively participates in
social life and helps bring to theoretical artculaton those positve political
currents already contained witn it Philosophical actvity Gramsci
remarks, must bseen 'a above all a cultural battle to transform the popular
"mentality" and to difuse the philosophical innovatons which will prove
themselves to b "historically tue" to the extent tat they become
concretely - i.e. historically and socialy - universal'.26 The organic in
tellectual tus provides the lin or pivot between philosophy and the people,
adept at the former but actvely idented with the latter. His or her goal is
to constct out of the common consciouness 'cultral-social' unity in
whic otherwse heterogeneous individual wills a welded together on the
basis of a common concepton of te world.
The organic intellectual thus neither sentmentlly acquiece in the
current state of awarenes of the masses, nor brings to them some alien tuth
from 'above', as in the usual baal caricatre of Lennism wdespread today
even on the politcal left. (It is worth nothng here tat Gramsci himself, far
from being the precursor of a 'liberal' Marxism whch regards politcal
leadership as 'elitist', was a revolutonary Marxist-Leninst) All men and
women, he asserts, are in some sense intellectuals. in that their practcal
activity involves an implicit 'philosophy' or concepton of the world. The
role of the organic intellectual, as we have seen, is to give shape and coheion
to ths practcal understanding, thus unifing theory and practce. 'One can
constuct', Gramsci argues, 'on a specifc prctce, theory whc, by
coinciding and identifing itelf with the decisive elements of the practce
itsel c accelerate the hstorical proceSs tat is going on, renderi
practice more homogeneous, more coherent, more efcient in all its
element, and thus, in other words, developing it potental to the m
mum . . .''
To do this, however, means combattng much that is negatve in the
empirical consciousness of the people, to whch Gramsci gives the ttle of
'common sense'. Such common sense is 'chaotc aggegte of dispaate
conceptons' - an ambiguous, contradictory zone of experience whic is on
the whole politcally backward. How could we expect it to be otherwise, ua
II
Ieolo
r bloc mhad centuries in whic to perfect it hegemony? In Gramc's
ve tere is B certain contnuum beteen 'spontaneous' and 'scientfc'
conscousness, such that the difcultes of the later should not be i
tdatngly overestmated; but there is also a penanent war between
rvolutonary theor and te mythological or folkoric conceptons of the
masses, and te later is not to be patonizingly romantcized at the epense
of te foner. Certain 'folk' conceptons, Gramsci holds, do indeed
spontaneously refect important aspect of socal life; 'popular concousness'
is not to be dismissed as purely negatve, but it more progres ive and more
reactonary features must intead b carefl y distnshed.28 Popular
moralty, for example, is partly te fossized residue of an earier hstor,
patly 'a range of often creatve and progressive in ovaton . , . whic go
against or merely difer fom, te moralit of te r stata of socety'?)
Wt is needed is not just some paterlist endorsement of existng popular
conciousnes , but the constrcton of 'a new common sense and with it a
new culture and a new philosophy whch w be rooted in the popular
conciousness with te same solidity and imperatve quality as tditonal
bliefs'.3 The functon of the organic intellectas, in oter words, is to forge
te m beteen 'theory' and 'ideology', creatng a two-way pasage
bteen politca analysis and popular experience. And the tet ideology
here 'is used in it highest sene of a concepton of the world that is
iplicidy manfest in a, in law, in economc actvity and in almanfest
atons of individual ad collectve lfe'.Jl Suc a 'world view' cement
togethe a soal and poltcal bloc, as a un, orgaig, inpiratonal
principle rater than a system of abstact ideas.
Te opposite of the orgac intelectual is te 'taditonal' one, who
blieve hl quite independent of soal lie. Suc fgures (clerics, idealist
phlosopher, Oxord dons ad the rest) are in Grmsci's view hangover
fom some previous historical epoc and in tis sense the distncton
bteen 'organic' and 'taditonal' can be to some extent decontucted. A
taditonal intellectual was perhps once organc, but is now no longer so;
idealist philosophers served te mddle class well in it revolutonary heyday,
but ar now a marginal embarrassment. The distncton between taditonal
and organic itelectual coresponds roughly to one we have taced beteen
te negatve and te positve senses of ideology ideology as thought whic
mcome untc from reality, as opposed to ideology a ideas in the actve
serce of a clas's interests. The traditonal intellectual's tust in his or her
independence of the r class is for Gc the mater bais of phio-
120
From Lukc to Gramd
sophca idealism - of the gullible faith, denounced by Te Gan Ielo
tat te source of idea is oter ideas. For Mar and Engels, by contrast, ideas
have no indeendent history at all: tey are the products of specific historical
conditon. But tis beliefin the autonomy of thought may sere a partcular
ruling class exceedingly well; and to tis extent the now taditional intellec
m may once have fulflled a 'organc' functon precisely in hs socal
disconnectedness. Indeed Gramsc hmself suggests as much when he claims
that the speculatve view of the world belongs to a class at te acme of its
power. We should remember in any case that te traditonal intellectual's
tst in the autonomy of ideas is not sheer ilusion: given te material condi
tons of mddle-class society, such members of the intelligentia really do
occupy a hghy 'mediated' positon in relaton to social le
.
Like Lukacs and Goldmann, Gramsc is an hstoricist Marxist who believes
that tut is hstorically variable, relatve to te consciousness of te most
progressive social clas of a partcular epoc. Objectvity, he writes, always
means 'humany objectve', which can in turn be decoded as 'hstorically or
universally subjectve'. Ideas are tue in so far a they sere to cohere and
promote those forms of consciousness whch are in tune wit the most
signfcant tendencies of an era. The alteratve case to tis is to claim that
the asserton tat Julius Caesar was asassinated, or that te wage-relaton
under capitalism is eploitatve, is eiter tue or it is not. A universa
consensus might always prove retospectvely to have been false. Moreover,
by what criteria do we judge that a specifc historcal development i
progressive? How do we decide what counts as the 'possible' consciousness
or most richly elaborated world view of te working class? How do we
determine what a class's true interest are? If tere are no critera for such
judgements outside tat class's own consciousness, then it would seem tat
we are tapped here in just the same kind of vicious epistemological circle
we noted in te case of Georg Lies. If those idea are tue whch sere to
realie certain social interest, does m not open the door to a cynical
pragmatsm whch, as with Stalinism, defnes objectvity as whatever
happens politically to suit you? Ad if the tet of the trut of ideas is that
they do in fact promote suc desirable interests, how can we ever be sure
tat it was te ideas in queston which did te promotng, rather than some
oter historical factor?
Gramsci has been critcized by 'structuralist' Marxists suc as Nicos
Poulantas for committn te historicist error of reducing ideology to the
121
Ieolog
expression of a social clas, and reducing a domnant class to the 'esence' of
the social forton.32 For Poulantas, it is not the hegemonic class whic
binds society together; on the contrary, the unity of a social formation is a
stuctural affair, an efect of the interlockng of several 'levels' or 'regions' of
social life under the fnally determining constraint of a mode of produc
ton. The politcal reality of a ruling class is one level within this formation,
not the principle which gives unity and directon to the whole. In a similar
way. ideology is a complex material stucture. not just a knd of collectve
subjectivity. A dominant ideology reflects not just the world view of the
rulers, but the relatons beteen governing and dominated clases in society
a a whole. Its task is to recreate, at an 'imaginary' level, the unity of the entire
social formaton, not just to lend coherence to te consciousness of orulers.
The relation between a hegemonic class and a domnant ideology is thus
indirect it passes, so to speak, through the mediation of the total social
structure. Such an ideology cannot be deciphered from te consciousness of
the governing bloc taken in isolation, but must be grasped from the stand
point of the whole feld of class struggle. In Poulantas's eyes, historicist
Marxism is guilty of the idealist mistake of believing that it is a dominant
ideology or world view which secures the unity of society. For him, by
contrast, the domnant ideology relect that unity, rather than contitutin
g it.
Gramsci's work is certainly vulnerable at point to Poulanta's critique of
historicism; but he is by no means enamoured of any 'pure' class subject. An
oppositonal world view is not for him just te expression of proletarian
consciousness. but an irreducibly composite afair. Any efective revolution
ary movement must be a complex alliance of forces; and its world view wll
result from a transformative synthesis of its various ideological component
into a 'collectve will'. Revolutonary hegemony, in oter words, involves a
complex practce u
p
on given radical ideologies, reartculatng their motfs
into a diferentiated whoie.J3 Nor does Gramsci overlook the relational
nature of such world views, a Lukacs is occasionaliy tempted to do. We have
seen already that he by no means underestmates the extent to whch the
consciousness of the oppressed is 'tainted' by the beliefs of its superiors; but
this relaton also works the other way round. Ay hegemonic clas, he wtes
in Te Prson Notebook must take account of the interests and tendencies of
those over whom it exert power, and must be prepared to compromise in
ts respect. Nor does he always posit a direct relaton beteen a domnant
class and a dominant ideology ' cass some of whose strata stll have a
Ptolemaic concepton of the world can none the less be te representatve of
122
Frm Lukc t Grami
a very advanced hstorcal sitaton'J4 'Stucturalist' Mm m custom
arily accused itS historicist counterpart of failing to distnguish beteen a
dominant and a detenninant social class - of overlooking the fct that one clas
can exercise political domnance on the basis of the economc determinacy
of another. Indeed something of the kind could be said of nineteenth
century Britain, where the economically determinant middle class largely
'delegated' its.politcal power to the aristocracy. Ts is not a situaton whc
any theory assumng a onetoone relaton beteen classes and ideologies
can easily decipher, since the resultant ruling ideology wil be tpically a
hybrid of elements drawn fom the experience of both classes. It is a sign of
Grasci's subtle historical insigt, however, tat his brief commentS on
Brtsh social history i Th Pon Notebook ru very muc along these les:
[In nneteenth-entury England] there i a ver extenive category of oranc
intellectuals - those, that is who come into existence on the sme indutral
terin as the economic grup - but in the higher sphere we find that te old
land-ownng clas preere it posicon of v monoply. It lose it
economic suprmac but maintain for a long time a politco-intellectal
supremacy ad i asimiated as 'tditonal intellectuals' and as a directve
group by te new group in power. The old land-wnng aristocc is joined
to the industrialist by a kind of suture whic is precisely that whc in oter
counte untes taditonal intellectuals with te new domnnt clase.)5
A whole vt aspect of Britsh class history is here summared wth brillant
succinctness, as endurng testmony to the creative orginality of itS author.
IZJ
5
FROM ADOR N O T O
BOU R DI E U
WE 5AW in capter Jhow a teory of ideology c b generated fom te
comodit form. But at the heart of Mar's economc analysis lie anoter
category also of relevance to ideolo, and this i te concept of exchge
value. In the ft volume of Cpil/ M eplains how to comodites
wit quite diferent 'use-values' c be equaly echanged, on te principle
that both conta te same amount of abstct labour. If it takes te same
quantty of labour-power to produce a Chna pudding and a toy
squirel, then tee prouct w have the same exce-value. whch is to
say that the same amount of money can buy them bot But the specifc
diferences between these object ar thereby suppressed, a teir use-value
becomes subordinat to their abstact equivalence.
mpriciple reig in the capitaist economy. it can also be obsered at
work in te hher reches of the 'superstucture'. In the politcal arena of
bourgeois society, all men and women are abstctly equal a voters
citens; but this theoretcal equivalence seres to ms their concrete
inequalite wt 'cv socety'. Landlor and tenant businessman and
prosttute, may end up in adjacent poll bot. Much the se is tue
of the juridical insttuton: all individuals are equal bore te law, but
m merely obscures te way in which the law itelf is ultately on the
side of te properted. Is tere. ten, some way of tacg tis principle
of fa equivalence even frther up the sol ed superstuctre, int
IZJ
Ieolo
the hedy realms of ideology?
Fr the Frankfun School Mst Theoor Adoro. this mecism of
abstact exchange is the very secret of ideology itsef Commodity exchange
efect an equaton between tings which are in fact incomensurable, and
so, i Adoro's view, doe ideologcal thought. Suc tought is revolted by
the sight of 'otheress', of that whic threatens to escape it own closed
system, and violently reduces it to its own image and leness. 'If te lion had
a consciousness', Adoro writes in Ne
g
ative Dialectic, 'h rage at te antelope
he wants to eat would be ideology'. Indeed Fredric Jameson has suggested
that the fundamental geture of all ideology is exactly suc a rigid binary
oppsiton beteen the self or familiar, whic i positvely valorized, and the
non-self or alen whic is thrust beyond the boundaries of inteligibit}
Te etical coe of good versus c,so Jameson considers, is then the most
exemplary moel of d principle. Ideolog for Adoro is thus a form of
'identty tg' - a covertly paranoid style of ratonalit whic inexorably
tnsmutes te uniqueness and pluralit of things into a mere simulacrum of
itelf or epels tem beyond it own border i a panic-sticken act of
exclusion.
On tis account, the opposite of ideology would be not truth or theory,
but dif erence or heterogeneity. And in this a i oter ways, Adoro's
thought stly prefgure tat of the post-stucturalsts of our own day.
In the face of this conceptual staiacketng, he afrms the essental non
identt of thought and reality, te concept and its object. To suppose that
the idea of feedom is identcal with the poor travest of it available in te
capitalist market place is to fail to see that tis object does not live up to it
concept Conversely, to imagine tat the being of any object can be
exhausted by the concept of it is to erase it unique materiality, since
concept are ineluctbly general and objects stubbory panicular. Ideology
homo
geie the world, spuriously equatng distnct phenomena; and to undo
it thus demands a 'negatve dialectcs', whic strives, perhaps impossibly, to
include witin thought tat which is heterogeneous to it. For Adoro, the
highest paradig of suc negatve reason i art, whic speaks up for the
differental and non-identcal, promotin te claims of the sensuous
partcular againt te tn y of some seamless tocit.2
Identty, then, is i Adorr's eyes the 'primal fon' of all ideology. Our
reifed consciousness refect a world of objects frozen in their mono
tonously self-same being, and in thus binding us to what is to the purely
'given', blinds us to the truth that 'what is, is more than it is'.3 In contt
126
From Adoro to Bourdieu
with much post-structuralist tinking, however, Adoro neither uncrtcally
celebrates the noton of difference nor unequivocally denounces te
principle of identty. For all its paranoid anxiety, te identty principle
carries wth it a frai hope that one day tue reconciliaton will come about
and a world of pure diferences would be indistnguishable from one of pure
identtes. The ide of utopia travels beyond both conceptions: it would be,
instead, a 'togetheress in diversity'.4 The aim of socialsm is to liberate the
rich diversity of sensuous use-value from the metaphysical prison-house of
echange-value - to emancipate history from the specious equivalences
imposed upon it by ideology and comodity production. 'Reconciliation',
Adoro writes, 'would release the non-identical, would rid it of coercion,
including spiritualized coercion; it would open te road to the multiplicity
of diferent things and stip dialectcs of its power over them.'s
How this is to come about, however, is not easy to see. For the critque of
capitalist society demands the use of analytic reason; and such reason would
seem for Adorno, at least in some of his moods, intrinsically oppressive and
reifcatory. Indeed logic itself whch Mar once described as a 'currenc of
te mind', i a kind of generalied barter or false equalizaton of concept
analogous to the exchanges of the market place. A dominatve rationality,
then, can be unlocked only with concepts already irredeemably contamin
ated by it and ts propositon itself since it obeys the rules of analytc
reason, must already be on the side of dominion. In Dialectic oEnlihtenment
(1947), co-authored by Adorno and his colleague Max Horkheimer, reason
h become inerendy violent and manipulatve, riding roughshod over the
sensuous partcularities of Nature and te body. Simply to tn is to be
guiltily complicit wth ideological dominaton; yet to surrender instru
mental thought altogether would be to lapse ito barbarous irratonalism
The identity principle stves to suppress all contradicton, and for
Adoro ths process has been brought to perfecton in the reifed, bureau
crted, admnistered world of advanced capitalism. Much the same bleak
vision is projected by Adoro's Franfurt Scool colleague Herbert Marcuse,
in his One-Dimenional Man (1964). Ideology, in short, is a 'totalitarian
system which hmanaged and processed all social confict out of existence.
It is not ony that this thesis would come as somethng of a surprise to those
who actually run the Wester system; it is arso that it parodies the whole
noton of ideoloy itelf The Frankfurt School of Marxism, several of whose
members were refugees from Nazism, simply projects the 'extreme' ideo
logcal universe of fascism onto the quite diferent structures of liberal
IZ/
Ideolog
capitst regimes. Dos al ideology work by te identty principle. rt
lessly expunging whatever is heterogeneous to it? What, for example, of te
ideology of liberal humanism, whic in however specious and resticted a
faon is able to make rom for variousness, plurlity, cm relatvity.
concrete partcularity? Adoro and his fellow workers deliver us someth
of a staw target of ideology, in the manner of those post-stucturalst
theorist for whom all ideology witout excepton would appear to tum
upon metphysical absolutes and transcendental foundaton. The real
ideological conditons of Wester capitalist societe are surely a god deal
more mixed and self-ontadictory, blending 'metaphysical' and pluralstc
discourses in varous meaures. A opposton to monotonous self-identty
('It takes all Xd to mke a world'); a suspicion of absolute tth ca
('Everyone's enttled to ther point of view'); a rejecton of reductve
stereotypes ('J take people as I fnd them'); a celebraton of diference ('It'd be
a stange world i we al thought the same'): these are part of the stock-in
tade of popular Wester wisdom, and nothig is to be politcally ganed by
carcaturg one's antgonst. Simply to counterpose diference to identty,
plurality to unity, te marginal t the central, is to lapse bac into binary
oppositon, as the more subtle deconstructors are perfecty aware. It is pure
formalsm to imagine tt oteress, heterogeneity and margity are
unqualifed politcal beneft regardless of teir concrete social content
Adoro, as we have seen, is not out simply t replace identty wt difer
ence; but his suggetve critque of the tyranny of equivalence leads h too
often to 'demonize' modern capitalism as a seamess, pacied, self
regulatg system. This, no doubt is what the system would lik to be told;
but it would probably be greeted with a certain sceptcism in te corridors
of Whitehal and Wall Steet
Te later Franfurt Scool phosopher Jirgen Habermas follows Adorno in
dismissing the concept of a Mrxist science, and in refusin to assign any
partcular privilege to the consciousness of the revolutionary proletriat. But
whereas Adoro is then left with little to pit against te system but a and
negative dialectcs, Habermas turns instead to the resources of communica
tve language. Ideology for him is a form of communicaton systematcally
distorted by power - a discourse whic has become a medium of domina
ton and whic seres to legitmate relatons of organized force. Fr
hermeneutical philosophers like Hans-Georg Gadamer, misunderstandings
and lapses of communication are tetual blockages to be rectfed by seni-
128
From Aoro to Bounieu
tve interretton Habrmas, by contrast, draws attenton to te possibilty
of an ente discurive system which is somehow deformed. What warps
such discourse out of true is the impact upon it of exta-iscursive forces:
ideology marks the point at whch language is bnt out of communicatve
shape by te power interests whch impinge upon it. But t besieging of
language by power is not just an exteal matter on the contrary, such
dominion inscribes itself on the inside of our speech, so tat ideology
bcomes a set of efect interal to partcular discourses themselve.
If a communicatve stucture is ssaticaly distoned. ten it wtend to
present the appearance of normatvity and jusmes. A distorton whch is s
perasive tends to cancel all the way tough and disappear from sight -just
as we would not describe as a deviaton or disbility a conditon in which
everybody lmped or dropped teir aitches U te tme. A systematcally
deformed netork of communicaton tus tends to conceal or eradicate the
very norms by which it might b judged to be defored, and so becomes
peculiarly invulnerable to critque. In this situaton, it becomes impossible to
raise wthin the netork te queston of it own workings or conditons of
possibility. since it h so to speak. confscated tee enquiries from te
outet The system's historical conditons of possibility are redefed by the
sytem itel thus evaporatng into it. mthe case of a 'succesfl' ideology, it
is not a tough one body of ideas u perceived to be more powerfl.
legtmate or persuasive tan another, but tat the very grounds for choosing
ratonaly beteen them have been deftly removed, so that it become
impossible to mor desire outide the terms of the system itelf Suc an
ideological formaton cures back upon itelflke cosmc space, denying the
possibility of any 'outide', forestaling te generaton of new desi as well
as fustat those we already have. If a 'universe of discourse' i tuly a
unilme then there is no standpoint beyond it where we might fnd a point of
leverage for critque. Or if oter universes are acknowledgd to eist then
they are simply defned a incommensurable with one's ow.
Habermas, to hs credit, subscribes to no such fanttc dystopian vision
of an all-powerful, all-absorbent ideology. If ideology is language wrenched
out of tue, then we must presumably have some idea of what an 'authentc'
communicatve act would lok like. There is, as we have noted, no appeal
open for m to, some scientc metalanguage which would adjudicate in
tis repect among competng idioms; so he must seek itead to extact
from our linguistc practces the structure of some underlying 'communica
tve ratonality' - some 'ideal speec situaton' which glers faintly
IZ
Ieolo
tough our actal debased discourses, and whch may therefore frsh a
norm or regulatve model for te critcal assessment of them.<
Te ideal speec sitaton would be one entrely fee of dominaton. in
which all partcipants would have symmetrically equal chances to select and
deploy speec act. Persuasion would depend on the force of the better
argument alone, not on rhetoric, authority, coercive sanctons and so on
This model is no more than a heuristic device or necessary fcton, but it is
in some sense implicit even so in our ordinary, unregenerate verbal dealings.
All language, even of a dominatve kind, is in Habermas's view inherently
oriented to communcaton, and thus tacitly towards human consensus:
even when I curse you I expect to be understood, oterwise why should I
wate my breat? Our most despotc speec acts betray, despite themselves,
the frail outlines of a communicatve rationalit: in making an utterance a
speaker implicitly claims that what she says is intelligible, true, sincere and
appropriate to te discursive situaton. (Quite how ths applies to suc
speech acts a jokes, poems and shouts of glee is not so apparent.) There is, in
oter words, a kind of , deep' ratonalit built into the very structures of our
language, regardless of what we actually say; and it is this whic provides
Habennas with the basis for a critique of our actual verbal practces. In a
crious sense, the very act of enunciation can become a normative judge
ment on what is enunciated.
Habenas holds to a 'consensus' rater than 'correspondence' theory of
tt which is to say tat he tnks truth less some adequaton beteen
mind and world tan a queston of the kind of asserton which everyone
who could enter into unconstrained dialogue with the speaker would come
to accept. But social and ideological domination currently prohibit such
unconstained communicaton; and untl we can tansform ts situaton
(whic for Habenas would mean fshonng a partcipatory socialist
democrcy), tut is bound to be, as it were, deferred. If we want to know
the tuth, we have to cange our political form of life. Trth is thus deeply
bound up with social justce: my truth claims refer themselves forard to
some altered soal conditon where they might be 'redeemed'. It is thus that
Habermas is able to obsere tat 'the truth of sttements is linked in te last
alysis to the intenton of the good and the true life.
There is an important diference between this style of thought and tat of
te more senior members of the Franurt scool. Fr tem, as we have seen,
soiety as it exsts seems wholly reied and degraded, sinisterly successf in
it capacity to 'administer' contadicton out of existence. This glomy
130
From Adoro to Bourdieu
vision does not prevent them fom discerning some ideal alternative to it, of
the kind that Adorno discovers in moderst art but it is an alteratve with
scant foundaton in the given socal order. It is less a dialectcal functon of
tat order, than a 'solution' parachuted in from some ontological outer
space. It thus fgures as a form of , bad' utopianism, as opposed to that 'good'
utopianism which seeks somehow to anchor what is desirable in what is
actual. A degraded present must be patiently scanned for those tendencies
whch are at once indissolubly bound up wt it, yet whch - interpreted in a
certain way - may be seen to point beyond it. So it is that Marxism, for
example, is not just some kind of wishful thinking, but an attempt to
discover an alteratve to capitalism latent in the very dynamic of that form
of life. In order to resolve its stuctural contradictons, the capitalist order
would hve to transcend itself into socialism; it is not simply a matter of
believing that it would be pleasant for it to do so. The idea of a communica
tve ratonalit is anoter way of securing an internal bond between present
and future, and so, like Marxism itself, is a form of 'immanent' critique.
Rather than passingjudgement on the present from the Olympian height of
some absolute tth, it installs itself within the present in order to decipher
those fault lnes where te rulng social logic presses up against its own
stctural limits, and so could potentially surpass itel There is a clear
parallel beteen such immanent critique and what is nowadays known as
deconstuction, whch seeks similarly to occupy a system from the inside in
order to expose those point of impasse or indeterminacy where its
governing conventons begin to unravel.
Habermas has often enough been accused of being a ratonalist, and there
is no doubt some justce in the charge. How far is it really possible, for
example, to disentangle the 'force of the better argument' from the rhetor
ical devices by which it is conveyed, the subject-positons at stake, the play
of power and desire whch wll mould such utterances from wthin? But if a
ratonalist is one who opposes some sublimely disinterested tuth to mere
sectoral interests, then Habermas is certainly not of ts company. On the
contrary, truth and knowledge are for him 'interested' to their roots. We
need tpes of instrumental knowledge because we need to control our
environment in the interests of surival. Similarly, we need the sort of moral
or politcal knowledge attainable in practcal communicaton because
without it there could be no collectve social life at all. 'I believe that I can
show', Habermas remarks, 'that species that depends for its survval on the
stuctures of linguistc communicaton and cooperatve, purosive-ratonal
131
Ideolog
acton must o neces it rely on reason.'8 Reaonng, i shorr, i in our
interests, grounded in te kind of biologcal species we are. Otherse why
would we bother to fnd out anythng at all? Such 'species-specifc' interests
move, naturally, at a hghly abstract level, and will tell us little about
wheter we should vote Tory to keep the rates down. But a wit com
muncatve rtonality, they can sere even so a a politcal norm: idelogical
interests whch damage the structures of practcal communcaton can be
judged inmical to our interests a a whole. A Thomas McCarty put it we
have a practcal interest in 'securing and expanding possibilites of mutual
and self-understndin m the conduct of life'," so that a kind of politcs u
derivable fom the sort of anmals we are. Interet are contitutive of our
knowledge, not just (as the Enlightenent believed) obstacles in its path. But
d is not to deny that there are kinds of interest which teaten our
fndamental requirement as a species, and tese are what Habermas terms
'ideological'.
Te opposite ofideology for Habermas is not exacty truth or knowledge,
but that partcular form of , interested' ratonality we call emancialr criti
q
ue
Ie is in our interest to rid ourselves of unnecessary constraints on our
comon dialogue, for unless we do te kinds of truths we need to establish
will be beyond our reach. A emancipator critique is one whic brings
these insttutonal constraints to our awareness, and tis can be aceved
only by te practce of collectve self-refection. Tere are certain form of
knowledge that we need at all costs in order to be free; and an emancipator
critque such as Marxism or Freudianism is simply whatever form of
knowledge d curently happens to be. In this kind of discoure, 'fct
(cognton) and 'value' (or interest) are not really separable: te patent in
psychoanalysis. for example, b an interest i embarking on a proces of
self-refecton because without this style of cogniton he wl remain
imprisoned in neurosis or psycosis. In a parallel way, an oppressed group or
class, as we have seen in te tought of Lulcs, han interest in gettn to
understand its social situaton. since witout d self-knowledge it will
remain a victm of it.
Tis analogy may be pursued a little frther. Domnative social inttu
tons are for Habermas somewhat akin to neurotc patterns of behaviour,
since they rigidi human life into a compulsive set of norms and tus block
the path to crtcal self-refecton. In bot cases we become dependent on
hypostasized powers, subject to constaint which are in fact cultural but
whic bear in upon us with all the inexorability of natural forces. Te
IJZ
Fm Aomo t U0mtc0
gratcatory instnct which suc instttons twar are ten eiter driven
underground, i the phenomenon Freud dubs 'repression', or sublimated
into metphysical world views, ideal value systems of one knd or anoter,
whic help to console and compensate individuals for the real-lie restic
ton tey must endure. Thee vlue systems thus sere to legitmate te
social order. channellng potental dissidence ito illusory forms; and d,in
a nuthell, i the Freudian theory of ideology. Haberma, mFreud hmelf
is at pains to emphsize tht tese idealized world vews are not ju illusions:
however distortedly, the lend voice to genuie human desires, and thus
conceal a utopian core. "at we can now only dream of mght always be
realzed in some emancipated fture, as technological development lberate
idivduals fom the compulsion of labour.
Habermas regards psychoanalysis as a discourse which seeks to emanc
pate us from systematcally distorted communicaton, and. so as sharng
common ground with the critique of ideology. Pathologcal behaviour, in
whic our words belie our actons, is tus roughly equivalent to ideology's
'performatve contadictons'. Just as the neurotc may vehemently deny a
wish whc nevertheless manifest itel in symbolc form on the body, so a
r class may prolam it belef i lberty while obstuctng it i practce.
To iterpret tese deformed discourses means not just tranlatng them into
other term, but reconstructg their conditons of possibity and
accountng for what Habermas cals 'the genetc conditons of the u
meanng'.10 It is not enoug, i other words. to uncramble a distorted text
we need rather to explai the causes of te tetal distorton itself A
Hibermas put te point wit unwonted pitness: 'The mutlatons {of the
text] have meaning as suc.' 11 It is not just a queston of deciphering a
language accidentlly afl cted with slippages, ambiguites and non
meanings; it is rather a matter of explaing the forces at work of which
tese tetal obscurites are a necessar efect. 'The break i the tet',
Habermas wrtes, 'are places where an intepretaton b forcibly prevailed
that is ego-alien even though it is produced by the self . . . Te result utht
the ego necessarily deceive itelf about it identty in the symblic stuc
tures tht it consciously produces.'12
To analyse a form of systematcally distorted comunicaton, whether
dream or ideolo, i thus to revea how it lacunae, repetton, elisions and
equivocaton are themelves signifcant. A M put the poit in Tore
o Suplu Value: 'dam Smith's contadictons are of signifcance because
they contin problems which it is tue he does not reolve. but which he
IJJ
Ideolog
reveals by contadictg hsel' IJ If we can lay bare te social conditons
whic 'force' a partcular discourse into certin deceptons and disguises. we
ca equally examine te repressed desires which intoduce distortons into
te behavour of a neurotc patent. or into te text of a dream. Both psycho
analysis and 'ideology critque', in oter words, focus upon te points where
meaning and frce itersect. In social life, a mere atenton to meaning, as in
hermeneutcs, wil fail to show up the concealed power interests by which
these meanngs are inteally moulded. In psychcal life. a mere concenta
ton on what Freud calls te 'manifest content' of te dream wll blind us to
te 'dream work' itself. where the forces of the unconscious are most
stealtly operatve. Both dream and ideology are in this sense 'doubled'
texts, conjunctures of signs and power; so tat to accept an ideology at face
value would be like falling for what Freud terms 'secondary revision', the
more or less coherent version of the dream text that the dreamer delivers
when she wakes. In both caes, what is produced must be grasped in terms of
it conditons of producton; and to this extent Freud's own argument has
muc in comon with 1 Gran Ieolog If dreams cloak unconscious
motvatons in symbolic guise, ten so do ideological text.
Ts suggests a further analogy beteen psychoanalysis and the study of
ideology, whc Haberma himself does not adequately explore. Freud
describes te neurotic symptom as a 'compromise formaton', since withn
ustcture to antagonstc forces uneasily coexist. On te one hand there
is te unconscious wish which seeks epression; on the other hand there is
the censorious power of the ego, which stives t thrust ts wish bac into
te unconscious. Te neurotc symptom, like the dream text, thus reveals
and conceals at once. But so also, one mght claim, do dominant ideologies,
whc are not to be reduced to mere 'disguises'. The middle-class ideology
of liberty and individual autonomy is no mere fcton: on te contry, it
signifed in its tme a real politcal victory over a brutally repressive
feudalism. At the same tme, however, it serve to mask the genuine
oppressiveness of bourgeois society. The 'truth' of suc ideology, as with the
neurotc symptom, lies neither in the revelaton nor te concealment alone,
but in the contradictory unty they compose. It is not just a mtter of
stripping of some outer disguise to expose the trut, any more than an
individual's self-ecepton is just a 'guise' he asumes. It is rather that wht
is revealed takes place in terms of what is concealed. and vice vera.
Mts often speak of 'ideological contadictons', as well a of'contad
ictons in reality' (though wheter ts later way of talking makes muc
IJ1
From Adoro to Bourdieu
sense is a bone of contenton amongst them). It mght then be thought that
ideological contradictons somehow 'reflect' or 'correspond to' contradic
ton in society, itself But the situation is in fact more complex
than this
sugests. Let us assume that there is a 'real' contradicton in capitalist society
between bourgeois freedom and its oppressive efects. The ideologcal
discourse of bourgeois liberty might also be said to be contadictor but this
is not exactly because it reproduces the 'real' contradiction in queston.
Rater, the ideology will tend to represent what is positive about such
liberty. while masking, repressing or displacing its odious corollaries; and
this masking or repressing work, as with te neurotc symptom, is liely to
interfere from the inside with what gets genuinely articulated. One might
claim then. that the ambiguous. self-contradictory nature of the ideology
springs precisely from its not authentcally reproducing the real contradic
tion; indeed were it really to do so, we might hesitate about wheter to term
this discourse 'ideological' at all.
There is a fn parallel between ideology and psychical disturbance
whic we may briefy examine. A neurotic pattern of behaviour. in Freud's
view. is not simply eres ive of some underlyng problem, but is actually a
way of trying to cope with it. It is thus that Freud can speak of neurosis a
the confused glimmerings of a kind of soluton to whatever is awry.
Neurotic behaviour is a strat
g for tackling, encompassing and 'resolving'
genuine conficts, even if it resolves them in an imaginary way. The
behaviour is not just a passive refex of this confict, but an actve. if
mystfed, form of engagement wit it. JUSt the same can be said of ideolo
gies. whic are no mere inert by-products of social contradictons but
resourceful strategies for containing, managing and imaginarily resolving
them Etenne Balibar and Pierre Macerey have argued tat works of litera
ture do not simply 'take' ideological contradictions, in the raw. as it were.
and set about lending tem some facttious symbolic resoluton. If suc
resolutions are p'ossible. it is because the contradictons in queston have
already been surepttously processed and transformed. so as to appear in
the literary work in the fr i teir potential dissolution.l The point may be
applied to ideological discourse as such, whic work upon the conict it
seeks to negotate, 'softening', masking and displacing them as the dream
work modifes and transmutes the 'latent contents' of the dream itself One
might therefore attbute to the language of ideology something of the
devices employed by te unconscious, in their respective labour upon their
'rw materials': condensaton, displacement, elision. transfer of affect,
135
Ideolog
conideraton of symbolic repreentabiicy and so on. And the a of ths
labour in both cases is to recast a problem in te fon of its potental
soluton.
Any parallel beteen psychoanalysis and the critque of ideology must
necessarily be imperfect. Fr one th, Habennas helf tends i raton
alist style to downplay the extent to whic te psychoanalytc cure comes
about less trough self-refecton than trough the d of tnsference
beteen patent and analyst. And it is not easy to mup an exact poltca
analogy to m. For another thng, as Russell Keat has pointed out, the
emancipaton wought by psychoanalysis is a matter of remembering or
'working trough' repressed materials. whereas ideology is less a queston of
sometg we have frottn than of sometng we never ke i the Hrst
place.Is We may note fl y tat in Habens's view the discourse of the
neurotc is a kind of privated symbolc idiom which has become split of
fom public communicaton, whereas the 'patology' of ideological
language belons fully to the public domain Ideology. as Freud might have
said. is a kind of psycopatology of everyday life - a system of distoron so
pervasive tat it cances all the way through and presents every appearnce
of normality.
Unlike Lukacs, Theodor Adoro ha little tme for the noton of relied
consciousness, whch he suspects as residually idealist. Ideology, for hm as
for the later N is not frst of al a matter of conciousness, but of the
material structure of commodity exchange. Habermas, to, regards a
primary emphasis on consciousness as belonging to an outmoded 'philos
ophy of the subject', and tur instead to what he ses as the more fertle
ground of social discourse.
The Frenc Mist philosopher Louis Althusser is equally wary of the
doctrine of reiHcaton, though for rater diferent reasons from Adomo's.l6
In Althusser's eyes, reiHcaton, like its companion category of alienaton,
presupposes some 'human essence' whch then undergoes estrangement; and
since Althusser is a rigorously 'ant-humanist' Mt. renouncing all idea
of an 'essentl humanty', he can hardly found his theory of ideology upon
suc 'ideological concepts. Neither, however, can he base it on the ater
tve noton of a 'world ve'; for if Altusser is ant-humanist he is equally
ant-htoricist. sceptcal of the whole concepton of a 'class subject' and Hrm
in hs belef that te science of historical materialism is quite independent of
class consciousness. What he does, then, is to derive a teory of ideology. of
136
Frm Aon t Umc
impresive power ad orignality. fom a combinaton of Lcanian psycho
analysis and the les obvousy historcst featu of Gsc's work; and it u
ths theory that c b found in his celebrated esay 'Ideology and Ideoiogcal
Stte Appartse'. a well as i scteed fment ofhi volume Fr MarP
Althusser holds that al thought u conducted within te tenn of an
unconscous 'problemat<' which silenty undepins tA problematc, rather
likecel Fucault's 'episteme', is a partcular organaton of categore
whic at any given historcal moment consttutes the lit of what we are
able to uter and conceive. A problematc is not i itelf 'ideological': it
includes, for eample, te discourse of te science, which for Althusser is
fee of all ideological taint. But we can spe of the problematc o a specifc
ideology or set of ideologes; and to do so is to refer to a underlying struc
ture of categories s organed a to exclude the possibility of certin
conceptons. A ideological problematc tur around cert eloquent
silence ad elisions; and it is so constucted that the queton whch are
posable withn it already preuppose certin kinds of answer. It fnda
mental structure is tus closed, circular and sel-on:wheever one
move withn it, one will always be ultmately retured to wht is securely
known, of which what u unknow is merely an extension or repetton.
Ideologies can neve b tn by surprse, since like a counel ledig a
witess in a law cour tey signal what would count a a acceptable answer
in the very for of their quetons. A scientc problematc, by contst, is
characteed by it open-endedness: t can b 'revolutoned' a new
scientfc object emerge and a new horizon of quetons opens up. Science is
an authentcally exploratory pursuit, whereas ideologe give the appearance
of moving forard whle marcg stbbory on the spot
In a controversial move withn Wester Mam8 Altusser isist on a
rigorous distcton between 'science' (meanin amon oter thngs Marxist
theory) and 'ideology'. The forer is not just to be graped in hstoricist style
a the 'epresion' of the latter on the contary. science or theory i specifc
kind of labour with it own protocols and procedure. one demarcated from
ideology by what Althusser calls an 'epistemological bre'. Whereas histor
icst Marxism holds that theory is validated or invalidated by historcal
practce, Althusser holds that social theories, rather like matematcs, are
verifed by methos whic are purely inter to them. Theoretcal proposi
ton are true or false reardless of who happen to hold tem for what
historical reaons. and reardless of te historical conditons which give
birth to the
137
Ieolo
Such a absolute oppositon between science and ideolog fnds few
defenders nowadays. and is clearly open to a range of coent critcisms. To
. carve the world down the middle beteen science and ideology is to squeee
out the whole area we call 'practcal' conciousnes - statement such as 'it's
raning' or 'do you need a lift?', whc are neither scientfc nor (in any
epecially usefl sense of te term) ideologcal. In a regresion to Enghten
ment rtonalism, Altusser in efect equates the oppositon beteen science
and ideology with one beteen tt and eror - though in his Es as in Sl
Crtci he acnowledges the 'theoretcist' natre of dmove.l9 There are
several reaon why ts homology wnot work Fr one thng, ideology, a
we have seen, is not just eroneous; and as Barry Baes points out, ideo
logcal interet of a dubious kind can temselves furter the advance of
scentc knowledge. (ares ctes te cae of Karl Pearson's school of stats
tcs, whic involved some rather sinister eugenic theory but led to valuable
scentfc work)20 Fr another th, science itelf is a ceaseless process of
tal and error. Not all ideolog is error, and not all eror is ideological. A
scence may sere ideological functon, as Mr considered the work of the
early politcal economit to do, and a Lmconsidered Marist science to
b the ideology of the revolutonary prolett Marx certany judged the
work of the bourgeois poltcal economst to be scientc, able to some
degree to penetate the appearances of capitalist society; but he also thought
it was inhibited at key points by ideological interests, and so was scientfc
and ideological at one and the same tme. Science. to be sure, i not reducble
to ideology it is hard to see how reearch on te pancreas is no more dan
epression of bourgeois interet, or how algebraic topology helps to
legitate te capitalist state. But it is, for all that, deeply inscribed by and
embedded withn ideology - either in te more neutal sense of the term as
a whole socially determned way of seeig, or sometme i the more pejora
tve sense of mystfcaton. In modem capitalist society, what is ideological
about science i not just ts or tat partcular hypothesis. but the whole
social phenomenon of scence itsel Science as suc - the tiumph of
tecnologcal, instumental ways of seeing the world - acts a an importnt
part of the ideological legitacinn of the bourgeoisie, which is able to
tlate moral and politcal questons into technical ones resolvable by te
calculatons of expert. One does not need to deny the genuine cogntve
content of much scientfc discourse to clam that science is a potent modem
myt Althusser is thus mistaken to view all ideology, a he ocasionally
does, as 'pre-scentc', a body of prejudices and supersttons wth whic
138
From Adoro t Bourdieu
science efects a pretemarrally clean break.
It is important, even so, to combat certain common travestes of his case.
In his central esay on ideology. Althusser is not arguing that ideology is
somehow inferior to theoretical knowledge; it is not a lesser, more confused
sort of knowledge, but strictly speaking no kind of knowledge at all.
Ideology, as we sw in capter 1, denotes for Atusser the realm of 'lived
relatons' rather d teoretcal cogniton; and it makes no more sense to
suggest that such lived relatons are inferior to scientfc knowledge than it
does to claim that feelng one's blood bi is somehow inferior to measurng
someone's blood pressure. Ideology is not a matter of truth or falsehood, any
more than grnning or whistlin are. Science and ideology are simply
different registers of being, radically incommensurable with one another.
There is no hint in this formulaton that ideology is a negatve phenomenon,
any more than 'experence' itself is. To write a Marxist treate on the politcs
of the Middle East would be for Athusser a scientfc project but it is not
necessarly more important than te ideological act of shoutng 'Down with
the imperialists!', and in some crcumstances mght be a god deal less so.
The Althusseran distincton between science and ideology is an episte
moloical, not a sociological one. Althusser is not asserting that a cloistered
elite of intellectals have the monopoly of absolute truth, while the masses
founder about in some ideological quagmre. On the contrary, a middle
class intel1ecral may well live more or less entirely within the sphere of
ideology, while a class-conscious worker may be an excellent teoretcian
We cross back and forth all te tme over te fronter beteen theory and
ideology a woman may chant femnst slogans on a demonstraton in the
morning (for Athusser an ideological practce), and pen an essay on the
narure of patriarchy i the afteroon (a theoretical actvity). Nor is
Althusser's positon theoreticist, holding that theory exists for its own sake.
For mas for any Marist, theory exist primarily for the sake of politcal
practce; it is just that in his view its tuth or falsity is not detrined by that
practce, and that, as a form of labour wth its own material conditons of
existence, it must be viewed as disanct from it.
Moreover, if the methods of theoretical iquiry are pecular to it it
materials are not. Theory goes to work among other tings, on ideology;
and in the case of historical materialism ths meanS the acrual politcal
experience of the working class, from which - for Althusser a muc as for
Lenn - the theorist must ceaselessly lea. Finally, though theory is the
guarantee of its own truth, it is not some metaphysical dogmatism. What
IJ
/
Ieolog
distnguishes a scientific fom an ideological propositon is tat the former
can always be wrong. A scientfic hypothesis is one that could always in
principle be falsifed; whereas it is hard to see how one could falsif a cr like
'Reclaim the nghtl', or 'Long live the Fatherland!'
Athusser, then, is not quite the austere high priest of theoretcal
terrorism lampooned by an enged E.P. Thompson in Te Povert oTheo
r
21
In his later work, Athusser comes to modif the absoluteness of the science/
ideology antithesis, arguing that Ma himself was able to launc his
scientc labours only after he had frst taken up a 'proletrian positon' in
politcs.22 But he does not thereby surrender his scientstc prejudice tat,
stctly speakig, ony scientc discourse counts as real knowledge; and he
do not abandon his claim that knowledge itself is in no sene historical.
Athusser refuses to recogne that the ver categories wthn which we
tn are historical products. It is one thing to reject the historicist case that
theor is simply an 'expression of historical conditons - a case whch tends
to suppress the specifcity of theoretical procedures. It is quite another tn
to hold that theory is entrely independent of history, or to argue that it is
wholy self-validatng. Magical thought and scholastc theology are both
rigorous, interally consistent bodies of doctrine, but Athusser would
presumbly not wish to ran them on a level with historical materalism
Tere is a diference between holding that historical circumstances
thoroughly conditon our knowledge, and believng that the validity of our
tt claims is simply reducble to our historical interests. The later case, as
we shall see in the next chapter, is really that of Friedrich Nietsche; and
though Althusser's own case about knowledge and hstory is about as far
from Nietsche's as could be imagined, there is an ironc sense in whic his
major theses about ideology owe something to his inuence. Fr Nietsce,
all human acton is a kind of fcton it presumes some coherent, autono
mous human agent (which Nietche regards a a illusion); implies that the
beliefs and assumptions by which we act are frmly grounded (which for
Nietsche unot the case); and assumes that the efects of our actons can be
ratonally calculated (in Nietsche's eyes yet another sad delusion). Aton
for Nietsche is an enormous, if necessary, oversimplificaton of the un
fathomable complexit of the world, which thus cannot coxist with refec
ton. To act at all means to repress or suspend such refectveness, to sufer a
certain self-induced amnesia or oblvion. The 'tue' conditon of our exist
ence, then, must necessarily be absent from consciousness at the moment of
acton. Ts absence u,so to speak, structral and detenined, rather than a
140
From Adomo to Burdieu
mere matter of oversight - rather as for Freud te concept of te un
conscous means that the force which determe our being can ot by
defniton fgure wtin our consciousness. We become concious agents
only by vrtue of a certain detennnate lac, repression or omission, which
no amount of critical self-refecton could repair. The paradox of the hu
animal is that it comes into being as a subject ony on te basis of a
shattering repression of the forces which went into it makng.
The Althusserian antthesis of theory and ideology proeeds roughly
along tese lines. One mght ventre, in a frst, crudely approximate foru
laton, that theory and prctce are at odds for Niete because he enter
tains an irtionalist suspicion of te former, whereas they are eterly
discrepant for Atusser because he harbours a ratonalist prejudice against
the later. Aacton for Atusser, includin socialist inurrecton, i cared
on wtn the sphere of ideolog; as we shall see in a moment, it i ideology
alone whch lends te human subject enough illusory, provisionl coherence
for it to become a practcal social agent. From the bleak standpoint of theory,
the subject m no such autonomy or consistency at : it is merely te
'overdetermed' product of ts or that socal stuctre. But since we would
be loath to get out of bed if ts trut was held steadily in mind, it must
disappear fom our 'practcal' consciousness. And it is in msense tat te
subject, for Althusser a for Freud, is the product of a stcture whch must
necessarily be represed in the very moment of'subjectvaton'.
One can appreciate, ten. why for Altusser teory and prctce must
always be somewhat at odds, in a way scandalous to te classical Mm
which insists on a dialectcal reaton between the two. But it uharder to see
exactly what ts discrepancy mean To claim that one cannot act and
theorize simultaneously may be lie saying that you cannot play the
Moonliht Sona! and analyse it musical stuccre at one and te same tme;
or that you cn ot b conscious of the gram tcal rles gover your
speech in te vry heat of utterance. But ts is hardly more signifcnt thn
saying that you carmot chew a banana and play the baipe simultaneously;
it mno philosophical import at al . It i cery a cry from mat d
la Nietsche that alacton entails a necessary ignorance of it ow enabling
conditons. The trouble with this case, at least for a Marxist, is that it seems
to rule out the posibility of theoretcally informed practce, which
Althusser, as orthodox Leninist, would be hard put to it to abandon. To
ca that your practce is theoretcally infored is not of course the same as
igthat you could engage in intensive theoretcal actvity at the very
141
Ideolog
moment you are closig the factory gate to loc out te police. Wat must
happen, ten, is tt a theoretical understanding does indeed realize itelfin
practce, but only, as it were, through the 'relay' of ideology - of the 'lived
fcton' of te actors concerned. And tis will be a radically diferent form
of understanding from that of the teorist in hs study, involvng it dos
for Althusser an inescapable element of misrecognton.
What is misrecoged in ideology is not primarily the world, since
ideology for Althusser i not a matter of knowg or failing to know reality
at all. The misrecogniton in queston is essentally a sel-msrecogniton,
whch is an efect of the 'imaginary' dimension of human estence.
'Imagnar' here means not 'unreal' but 'pertaining to an image': the allusion
is to Jacque Lacan's essay 'The mirror stage as formatve of the function of
te l', i whch he argues tat the small infant, confronted with its own
image i a mirror, has a moment of jubilant misrecogntion of its own
aa physically uncoordinated stte, imagining its body to be more unfied
tan it realy i.23 In ts imaginary conditon, no real distncton between
subject and object has yet set in; the infant identfes with its own image,
feelg itself at once wtn and in front of te mirror, so that subject and
object glide ceaselessly in and out of eac oter in a sealed circuit. In the
ideologcal sphere, simiarly, the human subject transcends its tue state of
dif useness or decentement and fnds a consolingly coherent image of itelf
refected bac in the 'mirror' of a dominant ideological discourse. Armed
with t iy self whc for Lacan involves an 'alenaton' of the
subject, it is ten able to act in socially appropriate ways.
Ideology can tus be summarized as 'a representaton of the imaginar
relarionsps of individuals to their real conditons of existence'. In ideology,
Althusser wtes, 'men do indeed express, not the relation between tem and
their conditions of existence, but the way tey live te relation between tem
and tei conditons of exstence: ths presupposes b,oth a real relaton and an
'imagina
r
', 'Uved' relaton . . . In ideology, the real relaton u inevitbly
invested in te imaginary relaton.'24 Ideology exists only in and through the
human subject; and to say that the subject inhabits the imaginary is to claim
that it compulsively refers the world back (0 itself Ideology is subject
centred or 'anthropomorphc': it causes us (0 view the world as somehow
naturally oriented to ourselves, spontaneously 'given' to the subject and the
subject, conversely, feels itself a natural part of that reality, claimed and
required by it. Through ideology, Altusser remarks, society 'interpellates' or
'has' us, appears to single us out as uniquely valuable and address us by
142
Frm Adoro to Bourdieu
name. It foster the illusion that it could not get on without us, as we can
ie the small infant believing that u it disappeared then the world
would vanish along wit it. In thus 'identifing' us, beckoning us personally
from the rck of individuals and turng its face benignly towards us,
ideology brings us into being as individual subjects.
Aof this, from te standpoint of a Marist science, is in fact an illusion,
since the dismal tuth of the matter is that society hno need of me at all. It
may need someone to fulfl my role within te process of production, but
tere is no reason why this partcular person should be me. Theory i
conscious of te secret that society has no 'centre' at all, being no more than
& assemblage of 'stuctures' and 'regions'; and it is equally aware that the
human subject is just as centreless, the mere 'bearer' of these various
stctures. But for purposive social life to get under way, these unpalatable
trths must be masked in the register of the imaginary. Te imaginary is
thus in one sense clearly false: it veils from our eyes the way subjects and
societes actually work But it is not false in the sense of being mere arbitrary
decepton, since it is a wholly indspensable dimension of social existence,
quite a essental as politics or economcs. And it ualso not false in so far as
the real ways we live our relatons to our social conditons are invested in it.
There are a number of logical problems connected with this theory. To
begin with, how does the individual human being rcognize and respond to
the 'hailing' which makes it a subject if it is not a subject already? Ae not
response, recognition, understanding, subjective facultes. so that one would
need to be a subject already in order to become one? To this extent, absurdly,
the subject would have to pre-date it own existence. Conscious of this
conundrum, Athusser argues that we are indeed 'always-already' subjects,
een in the womb: our coming, 'so to speak, has always been prepared for.
But if ths is tre then it is hard to know what to make of his insistence on
te 'moment' of interpellaton, uness this is simply a convenient fcton.
And it seems odd to suggest that we are 'centred' subjects even as embros.
For another tIing, the teory runs headlong into all the dilemmas of any
notion ofidentity based upon self-refecton. How can the subject recognize
its image in te mirror as itelf if it does not somehow recognize itself
already? There is nothng obvious or natural about looking in a mirror and
concluding that the image one sees is oneself Would there not seem a need
here for a third, higher subject, who could compare the real subject with its
refecton and establish that the one was truly identical with te other? And
how did this higher subject come to identf itself
143
Mcoloy
Athusser's teor of ideology involves at least two crucial msreadings of
te psychoanlytc witgs of Jacques Lacan - not surrsingly. given te
sybilline obscurantsm of the latter. To begin with, Athusser's ima
subject really corresponds to te Lacanian cyo. which for psychoanlytc
teor is merely the tp of te iceberg of te sel It u the ego, for Lacan,
whch is consttuted in the imaginary as a unifed entty; te subject 'as a
whole' is te split, lacng, desiring efect of the unconscious, which for
Lacan belongs to the 'symbolic' as well as the imaginary order. The upshot of
tis misreading, then, is to render Athusser's subject a good deal more stable
and coherent tan Lacan's, since the buttoned-down ego is standing in here
for the dishevelled unconscious. Fr Lacan, te imaginary diension of our
being is punctured and taversed by insatable desire, which suggest a
subject rather more volatle and turbulent than Athusser's serenely cented
enttes. The politcal implicatons of this msreading are clear: to expel
deire from the subject is t mute its potentally rebellious clamour,
ignorng the ways in which it may attin its allotted place in te social order
ony ambiguously and precariously. Athusser, in efect, has produced an
ideology of the ego, rater than one of the human subject and a certain
politcal pessimism is endemic in this msrepresentaton. Corresponding to
tis ideological mispercepton of hs on the side of te 'little' or individual
subject i a tendentous interpretcon of the 'big' Subject, te gover
ideological signifers with whic te individual identes. In Atusser's
reading, this Subject would seem more or less equivalent to the Freudian
superego, te censorious power which keeps us obediently in our places; in
Lacans work, however, ths role is played by the 'Oter', which means some
thing lke the whole feld of language and the unconscous. Since ts i
Lacan's view, is a notoriously elusive, treacherous terrain in which nothing
quite stys in place, te relatons beteen it and te individual subject are a
god deal more faught and fage than Atusser's model would imply.25
Once again, the politcal implicatons of this msunderstanding are pessi
mistc: if the power whc subjects us is singular and authoritarian, more
lie the Freudian superego than the shiftng, self-divided Lacanian Oter,
te chance of opposing it efectvely would seem remote.
If Athusser's subject were as split, desirous and unstable as Lacan's. then
the process of interpellaton might fgure as a more cancy, contadictory
afair tan it actually dos. 'Experience shows', Athusser wtes with solemn
banalit, 'that the practcal telecommunicaton of hailing is such that they
hdly ever miss teir man.: verbal call or whisde. the one hailed always
144
Fm Ador t Bourdieu
recognise that it i realy m who is bein hailed:26 The fact that Louis
Althusser's friends apparently never mistook his cheery shout of greetng in
the street is offered here as irrefutable evidence that the business of ideo-
f
logical interpellaton is invariably successful. But is it? What i we fail to
recoge and repond to the call of the Subject? What i we retur te
reply 'Sorry, you've got the wrong peson?' Tat we have to be interpellated
as some kind of subject is clear the alteative, for Lacan, would be to fall
outide the symbolic order altogeter into psychosis. But there is no reason
why we should always accept societys identcaton of us as mparicular
sort of subject Althusser simply rns together te necesity of some 'general'
identfcaton wit our submssion to specifc social roles. There are, after
all, many diferent ways in whch we can be 'hailed', and some cheery cres,
whops and whistles may ste us as more appealig d some others.
Someone may be a mother, Methodist, house-worker and trade unionist all
at te same tme, and there is no reason to assume that these various forms
of inserton into ideology wbe mutlly harmonous. Althusser's model is
a good deal too monistc, passing over the discrepant, contradictory ways in
whch subject may be ideloicaly accosted - partaly, wholly, or hardly at
al-by discourse whch themselves form no obvious cohesive unty.
A Peter Dew margued, the cry wit which the Subject greets us must
always be intrreted: and there is no guarantee that we w do ths in the
'proper' fashion/' How can I know for sure what is being demanded of me,
tat it is I who am being hailed, whether the Subject has identfed me
aright? Ad sice, for Lcan, I c never be fully present as a 'whole subject'
in any of my responses, how can my accession to being interpellated be
tken as 'authentc'? Moreover, i te response of the Oter to me is bound
up with my reponse to u,as Lacan would argue, then te situation becomes
even more precarious. In seekng te recognton of the Other. I am led by
ts very desire to misrecogne it, grasping it i the imaginary mode; so the
fct that tere is desie at work here - a fact which Althusser overlook -
means that I can never quite grasp the Subject and its call as they really are,
just as it can never quite)ow whether I have 'tuly' reponded to its ivoca
ton. In Lacan's own woi the Other just signifes ths ultmately inscrutable
nature of all individual subject. No paricular other can eer furh me with
the conflmaton of my identty I seek since my desire for such confrma
ton will always 'go beyond' ths fgure; and to write the other as Other is
Lacan's way of signalling ths trth.
Te politcal bleakess of Althusser's teory is apparent in h very
145
Ideolog
concepton of how te subject emerge into being. The word 'subject'
literally mean 'that whic lies beneath', in the sene of some ultmate
foundation; and throughout te history of phlosophy there have been a
number of candidates for this functon It is only in the moder period tat
te individual subject becomes in this sense foundatonal. But it is possible
by a play on words to make 'what lies beneath' mean 'what is kept dow',
and part of the Athusserian teory of ideology turs on this convenient
verbal slide. To be 'subjectfed' is to be 'subjected': we become 'fee',
'autonomous' human subjects precisely by submittng ourselves obediently
to the Subject, or Law. Once we have 'interlized' ts Law, made it
toroughly our ow we begn to act it out spontaneously and unqueston
inly. We come to work, as Althusse conents, 'all by ourselves', without
need of constant coercive supervision; and it is this lamentable conditon
tat we misrecognize as our freedom. In te words of the philosopher who
stnds beind all of Athusser's work - Baruc Spinoza - men and women
'fght for teir slavery as if they were fghtng for teir liberation' (
p
reface to
Tacttu Theologco-Politicu). The model behind this argument is the
subjecton of the Freudian ego to te supereo, source of all conscience and
authority. Freedom and autonomy, ten, would seem to be sheer illusions:
tey signf simply tat the Law is so deeply inscribed in us, so intmately at
one with our desire. that we mistake it for our own free initative. But ts is
ony one side of the Freudian naratve. Fr Freud, as we shall see later, the
ego will rebel against its imperious master if his demands grow too
insupportble; and the politcal equivalent of ths moment would be
insurrecton or revoluton. Freedom, in short, can transgress te very Law of
whic it is an efect but Athusser maintins a symptomatc silence about
ths more hopeful corollary of his cae. Fr h.as even more glaringly for
)chel Fucault, subjectivity itself would seem just a form of self-incarcer
aton; and the queston of where politcal resistance springs fom must thus
remain obscure. It is d stoicism i the face of an apparently al -perasive
power or inescapable metphysical closure which will fow into the current
of post-stucturalism.
There is, then, a distinctly pessimistic note in the whole Athusserian
concepton of ideolog, a pessimsm which Perry Anderson has identifed as
a abiding featre of Wester Marsm as such.28 It is as though the
subj!cton to ideolog whch makes of us individual subjects is secured even
146
Frm Adoro to Bourdieu
before it has properly te place. It works, so Althusser comments, 'in the
vast majority of cases, with the exception of the "bad subjects" who on
occasion provoke the interention of one of the detachments of the
(repressive) State appararuses'.2c One year before Althusser published these
words, those 'bad subjects' - a mere aside in hs text - came close to toppling
the Frenc state, in the politcal turmoil of 1968. Throughout hs essay on
'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses', there is a notable tension
beteen to quite diferent versions of the topic.3u On the one hand, he
acknowledges from tme to time that any enquiry into ideology must begin
fom the realities of class struggle. What he calls the ideological state
appartuses - school, famy, curch, media and the rest - are sites of such
conict, theatres of confrontaton between the social classes. Having
underlined this point, however, the essay appears to forget about it, veering
of into what is really a functonalist account of ideology as that whic helps
to 'cement' together the social formation and adapt individuals to its
requirements. Ths case owes someting to Gramsci; but it is also only a
short step from the commonplace doctrines of bourgeois sociology. After
passing over the inerenty conflictive nature of ideology for some thirty
paes, the essay then abruptly reinstates ths perspective in a belatedly added
postscript. There is, in other words, a hiatus beteen what Athusser asserts
of te political nature of the ideological apparatses - that they are felds of
class stuggle - and a 'socologistc' noton of ideology which is muc more
politcally neutral.
A functonalist approac to social instttons reduces their material
complexit to the stats of mere supports for other instittions, placing teir
signficance outside themselves; and such a view is stongly evident in
Althusser's argument. For it is difcult to see that schols, curches, famlies
and media are sheery ideological structres, with no other purpose tan to
buttress the domnant power. Schools may teach civic responsibilt and
salutng te fag; but they also teach children to read and wte, and
sometmes how to fsten their shoelaces, which would presumably be
necessary in a socialist order too. It would come as a pleasant surprise to His
Holiness the Pope to learn that the church in Latn Aerica was nothing
more than a support of imperial power. Television disseminates bourgeois
values; but it also tells us how to cook a curry or whether it might snow
tomorow, and occasionally broadcasts prog es highly embarrassing to
the government. The family is an arena of oppression, not least for women
and cildren but it occaionally offers kinds of value and relationship at
147
Ieolog
odds with the brutally uncaring world of monopoly capitlism. Al of these
insttutons, i short, are internally contadictory, sering diferent social
ends; and though Althusser sometmes recalls this, he just as quickly
represses it again Not all aspects of such appartuses are ideological all of the
tme: it is misleading to think of the ideological 'supertructure' as a fxed
realm ofinsttutons which operate in an invariable way.3!
What these institutons are functional fr is in Althusser's view the
economic 'base' of society. Teir main role is to equip subjects with the
forms of consciousness necessary for them to assume their 'pOSt' or
fnctons within material producton But this is surely too economstc and
'technicist' a model of ideology, as Althusser, in his appended postscript to
the essay, m clearly become aware. It leaves no room for non-class
ideologies such as racism and sexism; and even in class terms it is drastcally
reductive. The politcal, religious and other ideologies of a society are not
exhausted by their fnctons within economic life. Althusser's theory of
ideology would appear to lurch from the economic to the psychological
with a minimum of mediaton. It also sufers fom a certain 'structuralist'
bias: it is as though te social division oflabour is a structure oflocations to
which partcular forms of consciousness are automatcally assigned, so that
to occupy such a locaton is spontaneously to assume te kind of subjectvity
appropriate to it That this flattens out te real complexity of class
conciousness, quite apart from ignoring it entwinement with non-class
ideologies, is surely clear. And as uall dwere not enough, Althusser m
even been accused, ironcally enough, of committng the humanist error of
equatng all subjects with human ones; for legally speaking companies and
local authorites can be subjects too.
Whatever its faws and limits, Althusser's account of ideology represents
one of the major breakthroughs i the subject in modem Marxist thought.
Ideology is now not just a distortion or false reflecton, a screen which
intervenes between ourselves and reality or an automatc efect of
commodity producton. It is an indispensable medium for the producton of
human subjects. Among the various modes of production in any society,
there is one whose task is the producton of forms of subjectvity themselves;
and this is quite as material and historically variable as the producton of
chocolate bar or automobiles. Ideology is not primarily a matter of 'ideas': it
is a stucture which impose itelf upon us witout necessarily having to pass
trough consciousness at all. Viewed psychologically, it is less a system of
artculated doctrines than a set of images, symbols and occasionally concepts
148
Fm Ador t Bourdieu
which we 'live' at a unconscious level Viewed soologcal y, it consit i a
range of material practces or rituals (votng, salutng, genufectng and so
on) whch are always embedded in material insttutons. Altusser inherit
tis noton of ideology as habitual behaviour rater t concious tought
from Gramsc; but he presses te cae to a quasi-behaviourist exteme in m
claim that the subject'S ideas 'are h material acton ied ito material
practces goveed by material rituals which are themelves defned by the
material ideologcal apparats . . :.32 One do not ablish conciousness
simply by an hypnotc repetton of te word 'materal'. Indeed i the wake
of Althusser's work ts term rapidly dwindled to te merest gesture, grosly
infated in meang. eerhin
g
is 'mterial', even thought itelf ten te
word loses aldisctory force. Altusser's iistence on te materiality
of ideology - te fact tat it is always a matter of concrete practces and
insttuton - i a valuable correctve to Georg Lulcs's largely disembodied
'cas consciousness'; but it also stems fm a stuctralist hostity to
consciousnes a suc. It forgets tat ideology is a matter of meaning, and
that meaning i not material in te sense that bleeding or bellowing are. It is
te tat ideology is less a queston of ideas d of feel images, mt
reactions; but idea ofen fgure importntly within it as is obvious enough
in the 'teoretcal ideologies' of Aquinas and Adam Smt
If the term 'material' sufers undue inaton at Althusser's hd, so also
does the concept of ideolog itelf. It become, i efect, identca with lived
experience; but wheter lived experence c useflly be decribed a
ideological i surely dubious. Expande i this way, te concept threatens to
lose all precise politcal reference. If loving Gd is ideologcal, then so,
presumably, is loving Gorgonzola. One of Althusser's most contoversial
ca - tat ideology is 'eter', and wexist even in comunist socety -
then follows logically fom this stetced sense of the word. Fr sice ter
will be human subject and lived experience under communism, tere u
bound to be ideology as well Ideology. Altusser declares, mno hstory - a
formulaton adapted from Th Gennan Ieolo
g
but hesed to quite
diferent ends. Tough it content are of course historically variable. it
stctural mechansms remain constnt. In this sense, it is analogous to the
Freudian unconcious: everyone dreams diferently, but the operaton of the
'dream work' remain contant from one tme or place to anoter. It i hard
to see how we could ever know that ideology is uncng in it bc
device; but one telling piece of evidence against ths claim i the fact that
Althusser ofers a a ycmr/teory of ideology what is arguably specifc to
1
Ideolog
te burgeois epoh. Te idea that our freedom and autonomy lie in a
submission to the Law m its sources in Enightenment Europe. In what
sense an Athenian slave regarded himself as free, autonomous and uniquely
individuated is a queston Althusser leave unanswered. If ideologcal
subjects work 'all by themelves', then some would seem to do so rather
more than others.
Li the poor, then, ideology is always wit us; indee the scandal of
Althusser's thesis for orthodox Msm is that it wactualy outlast them.
Ideology is a stucture essent to the life of a hstorical societies, whch
'secrete' it organically; and post-revolutonary societes would be no
diferent in this respect. But there is a sliding in Althusser's thought here
bteen three quite diferent views of why ideolog is in business in the first
place. Te frst of thee, as we have seen, is essentally politcal: ideology
exists to keep men and women in their appointed places in class society. S
ideology in thi sense would not le on once clases had been abolised;
but ideology i its more functonalist or sociologcal meaning dearly would.
ma classles social order, ideolog would carry on its task of adaptg men
and women to the exigencies of social life: it is 'indispensable in any society
u men are to be formed, tansformed and equipped to respond to the
demands of their conditons of existence'.33 Such a case, as we have seen,
follows logically from this somewhat dubiously stretched sense of the term;
but tere is also another reason why ideolog wll persist in post-class
society, whch is not quite at one wi th tis. Ideology will be necessary in such
a future, as it is necessary now, because of the inevitable complexity and
opaqueness of social processes. The hope that in communsm suc processes
might become transparent to human consciousness is denounced by
Althusser as a humanist error. The workings of the social order as a whole
can bknown only to theory; as far as the practcal lives of individuals go,
ideoloy is needed to provide them with a kind of imaginary 'map' of the
soial totity, so that they can fnd their way around it. These individuals
may also of course have access to a scientfc knowledge of the social forma
ton but they cannot exercise ths knowledge in te dust and heat of
everyday life.
This case, we may note, introduces a hitherto unexamined element into
the debate over ideology. Ideology, so the argument goes, springs from a
siraton in which social life has become too complex to be grasped as a
whole by everyday consciousnes. Tere is thus the need for an imaginary
model of it, which w bear something of the oversimplifing relaton to
l>0
From Adoro to Bourdieu
soial reality tat a map does to an actual terain. It is a case whc goes back
at least as far as Hegel, for whom ancient Greece was a society immediately
transparent as a whole to all its members. In te modern period, however,
te division oflabour, the fragmentaton of social life and the proliferaton
of specialied discourses have epelled us from that happy garden, so that
the concealed connection of society can be known only to the dialectcal
reason of te phlosopher. Society, in the terminology of the eighteenth
century, has become 'sublime': it is an object which cannot be reresented. Fr
te people as a whole to get their bearings witin it, it is essental to
construct a myth whch w translate theoretcal knowledge into more
graphc, immediate terms. 'We must have a new mythology', Hegel writes,
but this mythology must be in the serce ofIdeas; it must be a mythology of
Reaon. Until we express the Ideas aesthetcally, that is, mythologically, they
hve no interest for the people; and converely, unt mytology is rtona the
philosopher must be ashamed of it Thus in the end enlightened and unen
lightened must clasp hands: mythology must become philosophical in order
to make people rtonal, and philosophy must become mythological in order
to make te phosophers senible.34
A somewhat parallel view of ideology can be found in the work of the
anthropologist Cliford Geert. In hs essay 'Ideology as a Cultral System',
Geert argues tat ideologies arise only when the taditonal, pre-refectve
ratonales for a way have life have broken down, perhaps under the pressure
of politcal dislocatolL No longer able to rely on a spontaneous feel for
social reality, individuals in these new conditons need a 'symbolic map' or
set of 'suasive images' to help them plot their way around society and orient
them to purposive acton. Ideology emerges, in other words, whn politcal
life becomes autonomous of mythc, religious or metaphysical sanctons.
and must be charted in more explcit, systematc ways.J5
Hegel's myt, then, is Althusser's ideology, at least in one of its versions.
Ideology adapts individuals to their social functons by providing them with
an imaginary model of the whole, suitably schemaced and fctonalied for
teir purposes. Since ths model is symbolic and afectve rather than
austerely cognitive, it can furnish motvatons for action as some mere
theoretical comprehension might not. Communist men and women of the
future will reuire such an enabling fction just like anyone else; but
meanwhle, in class-soiety, it serves te additonal function of helping to
I>l
Ieolog
thwart tre iight into the social system, tus reconcig individuals to
teir locatons within it. The 'imaginary map' function of ideology, in other
words, fulfls both a politcal and a sociological role in the present; once
exploitaton hbeen overcome, ideology will lve on in its purely 'sociol
ogcal' functon, and mystfcaton will yield to the mythical Ideology wll
scll be in a certain sense false; but its flsity wno longer be in the service
of domint interest.
I have suggested that ideology is not for Althusser a pejorative term; but
this claim now requires some qualifcaton. It would b more accurate to say
tat his tets are simply inconsistent on ths score. There are times in his
work when he speaks explicitly of ideology a false and illusory, pace those
commentators who take him to have broken entrely with suc epistemo
logical notons.36 The imagi mappings of ideologcal fctons are false
fom the standpoint of teoretcal kowledge, i the sense that tey actally
get society wrong. So it is not here simply a queston of sel-misrecogniton,
a we saw in the case of te imaginary subject. On the other hand, this falsity
is absolutely indispensable and performs a vital social functon. So although
ideology is false, it is not peoratively so. We need ony protest when suc
falsehood is harnessed to te purpose of reproducin exploitatve socal
relatons. There need be no implication that in post-revolutonary society
ordinary men and women will not be equipped with a theoretcal under
standing of the social totality; it is just cat this understanding cannot be
'lived', so that ideology is essental here too. At other times, however,
Altusser writes a though terms like 'tre' and 'false' are quite inapplicable
to ideology, since it is no knd of knowledge at all. Ideology implicates
subject; but for Altusser kowledge is a 'subjectless' process, so ideology
must by defniton be non-cognitve. It is a matter of experience rather than
insight; and in Althusser's eyes it would b an empiricist eror to believe that
experience could ever give birth to knowledge. Ideology is a subject-centred
view of realit and a far as theory is concerned, the whole perspectve of
subjectvity is bound to get thngs wrong, viewing what is in trt a centre
les world from some deceptvely 'cented' standpoint But though ideolo
is thus false when viewed from the eteral vantage-point of theory, it is not
false 'in itself - for d subjectve slant on the world is a matter of lived
relaton rather than contovertible propositons.
Another way of putting this point is to say that Althusser oscillates
between a rationalist and a positivist view of ideology. For te rationalist mind,
ideology signfes error, as opposed to the trth of science or reason; for the
152
Frm Ador to Burdieu
positvist. only certain sort of sttements (sciencc, empircal) are veril
able, and others - moral presciptons, for itance - are not even candidate
for such trutfalsity judgements. Ideology is sometmes seen a won, and
sometmes as not even propositonal enough to be wrong. When Althusser
relegates ideology to te b 'other' of tue knowledge, he spea lie a
ratonalist when he dismisses the idea tat (say) moral utterances are in any
sense cognitve, he write like a positvist. A somewhat silar tenion c be
obsered in te work of Emile Durkheim, for whose T Rules o Sociolo
g
ical
Method ideology is simply an iratonal obstcton to scientfc kowledge,
but whose TElement
r
Fors of Reliiou Li views religion a an es ental
set of collectve representatons of social solidarit.
Ideology for Althusser is one of three 'regions' or 'instances' - the other to
are the economic and the politcal - whch together make up a soial
formaton. Each of these regions is relatvely autonomous of the other; and
in the case of ideolog tis allows Althusser to steer between an economism
ofideology, whch would reduce it to a refex of material producton. and a
idealism of ideology, whch would regard it as quite disconected fom
social life.
This insistence on a non-reductve account ofideology is characteristc of
Western Marxism as a whole, in its sharp reacton to the econorusm of its
late-nineteenth-centry forebears; but it is also a positon forced upon
Marxist theory by the political hstory of the tenteth centry. For it is
impossible to understand a phenomenon lie fascsm witout notng te
extraordinarily high priority it assigns to ideological queston - a prorit
which could at tmes be at loggerheads with te politcal and economic
requirements of the fascist system At the height of the Nai war efort,
women were prohibited from factory work on ideological gounds; and the
socalled 'tm soluton' disposed of many individuals whose skills might
have been useful to te Nais, a well a tyng up manpower and resources
which could have been deployed elsewhere. Later in te cetury, a similarly
high priorit is ascribed to ideology by a quite diferent politcal movement
feminism. There seems no way in which the oppression of women can be
merely deduced from the imperatves of material producton, interoven
with such matters though it doubtless is. Throughout the 1970s, then. the
appeal of Althusserianism had much to do with te space it appeared to
open up for emergent political movement of a non-class kind. We shall see
later tat this valuable shift away from a reductve Marism sometmes
153
Ieolog
ended up in a dismissl of social class altogether.
In hs Poltical Power and Social Clase, the Athusserian teorist Nicos
Poulantas carries Athusser's distncton between social 'regions' into the
feld of ideology itself Ideology can itself be discrimnated into various
'instnces' - moral, politcal, juridical, religious, aestetc, economc and so
on and in any given ideological formaton one of these instances will
tical y be dominant. thus securig that formaton's unty. In feudalism, for
example, it is religious ideolog which predominates, whereas in capitlism
the jurdico-politcal instance comes to the fore. What 'level' of ideology is
dominant will be determined primarly by whic of them masks the realities
of economic exploitaton most effectively.
A distnguishng feature of bourgeois ideolog, Poulantas argues, is the
absence fom it discourse of all trace of class domination. Fudal ideology,
by contast, is muc more explicit about suc class relatons, but justfies
them as narrlly or religiously grounded. Bourgeois ideolog, in other
words, is tat form of dominative discourse which would present itself as
entrely inocent of power -just as the bourgeois state tends to ofer itself a
representn te general interests of soiety at large, rather d as an
oppressive apparatus. In bourgeois ideolog, Poulancas holds, this
dissemblig of power tkes a specifc form: the concealment of politcal
interest behind the mask of science. The end-of-ideology thnkers, who
applauded the supposed transition from a 'metaphysical' to a 'technological'
ratonality, are tus simply endorsing what was endemic in bourgeois
ideolog al along. Such ideologies, so Poulantas argues, are notable for
their lack of appeal to te sacred or tscendentl; instead tey ask to be
accepted as a body of scientfc techniques.
Among contemporary theorist, this view of bourgeois ideology as a
rdically 'ts-worldly' discourse has gained considerable ground. Fr
Rymond Boudon, ideologies are doctnes baed on spurious scientfc
theore; tey are, in a word, bad science.37 Dick Howard argues tat
ideolo is a matter of te 'imanent value-logic of capitalism': capitalism
requires no tanscendental legitmaton, but is in some sense its own
ideology.38 Avin Guldner defnes ideology as 'te mobilisaton of the
mase of public projects via the rhetoric of ratonal discourse', and sees it as
stving to close the gap betwee private interests and te public good.
'Ideology', Guldner writes, 'thus entailed the emergence of a new mode of
politcal discourse; discourse tat sought acton but did not merely seek it by
invokng autority or tadition, or by emotive rhetoric alone. It was
154
From Adoro to Bourdieu
discourse predicted on the idea of grounding political action in secular and
ratonal theory . . .39 Ideology in Guldner's view thus involves a brek wit
religious or mythologcal conceptions; and a similar case is urged by Claude
Lefort, for whom ideology renounces all appeal to otherworldly values and
seek to conceal social divisions in secular terms alone.40 Jurgen Habermas
claims tat ideologies 'replace traditional legitimations of power by
appearng in the mantle of modern science and by deriving their justfica
ton fom the critque of ideology (in the sense of metaphysical systems)'.1
To this extent tere can be no pre-bourgeois ideolog ideology as a
phenomenon is born with the bourgeois epoch, as an organic part of its
secularzing, ratonaliing tendencies.
Suggestive though this case is, it is surely too one-sided. The dominant
ideology in Britain today, for example, encompasses both 'rational' and
taditonalist elements: appeals to technical effciency on the one hand, te
adulaton of monarchy on the other. The most pragmatist, technocratic
soiety in te world - te United States - is also one of the most full
bloodedly 'metaphysical' in its ideological values, solemnly invoking God,
Freedom and Nation. The businessman justfes his activity at the ofce by
'rtional' critera before returng to the sacred rituals of the famly hearth.
Indeed the more drearily utilitarian a dominant ideology is, the more refuge
wl be sought in compensatory rhetorics of a 'transcendental' kind. It is not
uncommon for the best-selling author of pulp fction to believe in the
unfathomable mysteries of artistic creation. To see ideology simply as an
alterative to myth and metaphysics is to miss an important contradicton in
moder capitalist societies. For such societes stll feel the need to legitmate
their actvites at the altar of transcendental values, not least religious ones.
while steadily undermining the credibility of those doctnes by their own
rthlessly ratonalizing practices. The 'base' of moder capitalism is thus to
some etent at odds with it 'superstructure'. A social order for which truth
mean pragmatc calculaton contnues to cling to eternal verites; a form of
life whic in dominatng Nature expels z myster from the world stl
ritually invokes the sacred.
It uhard to know what bourgeois society can do about this dissonance. If
it were to renounce all metaphysical gestures, drawing its legitmaton
instead from its actual social behaviour, it would risk discreditng itself but
a long a it clings to transcendental meanings. the discrepancy beteen
them and its everyday practce will be painfully evident. The dilemma u
usually resolved by a sort of double think: when we hear talk of freedom,
155
Ieolog
justce and te sacredness of the individual. we both believe and do not
believe that suc talk should make a difference to what we actually do. We
hold fervently that such values are precious; we also believe that, as te man
sad, it i when religion strt to interfere with your everyday life that it is
tme to give it up.
Altusser's thinking about ideology is on a fairly grand scale, revolving on
suc 'gobal' concepts as the Subject and ideological state apparatses,
whereas te French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is more concered to
examine te mechnisms by which ideology takes hold in everyday life. To
cckle this problem. Bourdieu develops in his Outline oj a Teor ojPractice
(1 977) the concept of habitus by whic he means the inculcaton in men and
women of a set of durable dispositons which generate partcular practces. It
is because individuals in society ace in accordance with such internalied
systems - what Bourdieu calls te 'cultural unconscious' - that we can
explai how teir actons can be objectvely regulated and harmonized
without being in any sense the result of conscious obedience to rules.
Trough these stuctured dispositons, human actons may be lent a unt
and consistency without any reference to some conscious intention. In the
very 'spontaneit' of our habital behviour, then, we reproduce certain
deeply tacit norms and values; and habits is thus the relay or tansmission
mesm by which mental and social stuctures become incanate in daily
social activity. Te habitus, rther like human language itself is an open
ended system which enables individuals to cope with unforeseen, ever
changing situatons; it is thus a 'strategy-generatng principle' whic permts
ceaseless innovaton, rther ma rigid blueprint.
Te term ideology is not partcularly cental to Bourdieu's work; but i
habitus is relevant to the concept, it is because it tends to induce in social
agents such apiratons and actons a are compatble with the objectve
requirement of their social circumstances. At its strongest, it rles out
other modes of desiring and behaving as simply unthinkable. Habitus is thus
'history tured into nature', and for Bourdieu it is through this matching of
the subjectve and the objectve. what we feel spontneously disposed to do
and wht our social conditons demand of us, that power secures itsel A
social order stves to naturalize its own arbitariness though this dialectc
of subjectve aspiratons and objective stuctures, defnin each in terms of
the oter; so that the 'ideal' conditon would be one in whic te agent'
consciousness would have the same limit as the objectve system which
156
Frm Aoro to Bourdieu
gives rise to t The recogton of legtmacy. Bourdieu sttes. 'i te
misrecogniton of arbitarness'.
What Bourdieu calls doxa belongs to the knd of stable, traditon-bound
soial order in which power i fully naturalied and unquestonble, so that
no social arrangement diferent from the present could even be imagined.
Here. as it were, subject and object merge indistnguishably into each other.
What matters in such socetes is what 'goes without saying'. which is
determined by taditon; and tadition is always 'silent', not least about itself
a taditon Ay callenge to such doa i then hetodox. against whic the
gven order must assert its claims in a new orhodo Suc orthodoxy difers
frm doxa in that the guardians of taditon, of what goes without saying. are
now compelled to speak i teir own defence, and thus iplictly to present
themelves a simply one possible positon, among others.
Socal life contains a number of different habitus. eac system appro
priate to what Bourdieu terms a 'feld'. A feld, he argue in Qutions d
sociologie (1980), is a compettve system of social relatons whch functons
accordig to its own inter logic, composed of insttutons or indivduals
who are competg for the same stake. What is generally at stake in suc
felds is te attainment of maximum dominance within tem - a dominance
which allows those who acheve it to confer legitmacy on other partcipant,
or to withdraw it from them. To aceve such domnance involves amassing
the maximum amount of the partcular knd of 'symbolc capital' appro
prate to the feld; and for such power to become 'legitmate' it must cease to
be recognied for what it i. A power whic i ttly rather t explicitly
endorsed i one whic bsucceeded i legitmatng itel
Any suc social feld is necessariy stctured by a set of unspoken rules
for what can be valdly uttered or perceived wtn it and these rule thus
operate as a mode of what Bourdieu terms 'symbolc violence'. Since
symbolic volence i legitmate, it generally gos unrecognied aviolence. It
is, Bourdieu remarks in Outline ofa Teor o Practice. 'the gentle, invisible
form of violence, whc is never rcognised a such, and i not so much
undergone as chosen. the violence of credit, confdence, oblgaton, personal
loyalty, hospitlity, gfts. grattude, piety . . . `` m the feld of educaton, for
example. symbolc violence operate not so much by the teache spea
'ideologically' to the students, but by the teacher being perceived a in
possession of an amount of 'cultural capital' which the student neds to
acquie. The educatonal system thus contibutes to reproducing the
domnant social order not so muc by te vieoints it fosters, but by ts
157
Idolo
regulated distbuton of cultuial capital. A Bourdieu argues i Distntion
(1979), a simiar form of symbolic violence uat work i te whole feld of
culture, where those who lack te 'correct' tste are unobtsively excluded,
relegated to shame and silence. 'Symbolic violence' i tus Bourdieu's way of
retinking and elaboratin the Grmscian concept of hegemony; and his
work a a whole represent an orginal contributon to what one might call
te 'microstctures' of ideology, complementng te more general notons
of te Mst taditon wt empircally detailed accounts of ideology as
'everyday life',
I>8
6
FROM S C HOP E NHA U E R
TO SOR EL
FOR T Enghtenment, as we saw earlier, the enemy of ideology was,
paradoxcally, ideology. Ideology in the sense of a science of ideas would
combat ideology in te sense of dogma, prejudice and mndless traditon
alsm. Behind ths belief lay a supreme confdence in reason typical of the
middle class in its 'progressive' phase: natre, society and even the human
mnd itself were now raw materials in its hands, to be analysed, mastered
and reconstructed.
A ts confdence gradually wanes throughout the nneteenth century,
wt the emergence of a fully fedged industrial capitalist order about which
there seemed little ratonal, a new current of thought comes to the fore. In a
society where 'reason' has more to do with the calculaton of self-interest
than with some noble dream of emancipaton, a scepticism about its lofty
powers steadily gathers force. The harsh reality of this new social order
would seem not reason, but appetite and interest if reason ha a role at all, it
is te purely secondary ope of estimating how the appettes can be most
efectvely grtfe. Reason can help to promote our interests, but it is
powerless to pass ctcal judgement on them. If it can 'ventiloquize' te
pasions, it remains itself entrely mute.
Such a standpoint had already been part of te famliar stoc-in-trade of
English empiricist phlosophy, from Thomas Hobbes to David Hume. For
Hume, reason can only ever be the slave of passion; and for tis trend of
IJ
Ideolog
thought in general the tsk of reason is to ascertain the natre of t as
ectly as possible, so that we may the better realie our appettve ends. But
there is a latent tension beteen the to parts of ts statement. Fr if'man'
is essentl y a self-interested anmal, wnot these interest tend to distort
hs ratonal judgement? How can he be at once an impartal analyst of te
world, and a partsan creature who views objects only in relaton to hs own
needs and desires? To know what is ratonally the case, I must so to speak
remove myself and my prejudices from te scene of inquiry, behave as
tough I were not there; bu t such a project can clearly neer get off the ground.
There is, in fact, a distncton beteen passion and interest, whch
Abert Hirschman ha usefully examined.! Fr seventeenth- and eighteenth
century tought. to folow one's interest was on the whole positve, whereas
to follow one's passions was not. 'Interests' suggested a degree of ratonal
calculaton, as opposed to being driven on by blind desire; it acts as a knd of
intermediary category beteen the passion, whch are generally base, and
the reason, whch is generally inefectal. In te idea of 'interests', so
Hirschman argues, the passions are upgraded by reason, while reason is lent
force and directon by passion. Once te sordid passion of geed can be
transmuted to the social interest of making money, it can suddenly be
acclaimed as a noble goal. There was always of course te risk that this
oppositon could be deconstcted - that 'promotng one's interests' JUSt
meant counterposing one set of passion to another but 'interest' had te
sense of a rational self-love about it, and was seen as convenently predictable,
whereas desire was not. 7 te physical world is ruled by the laws of
movement', proclaimed Helvetus. 'so is the moral universe ruled by laws of
interest';2 and we shall see tat it is only a short step fom ths classic
bourgeois doctine to the assumpton of postodernisr
It is a easy step fom holding that reaon is simply a neutal itument
of the passions, to claiming that it is a mere refex of tem. What i the
supposed anttesis beteen reason and interests could be deconstrUcted,
and reason be grasped simply a a modality of desire? What if ths most
elevated of te human facultes, whch traditonally brings us withn the
orbit of divinity, were in reality just a disguised form of malce, loning,
loathing, aggression? If ts is so, then reason ceases to be the opposite of
ideology, and becomes itself ideological through and through. It is
ideological, moreover, in to senses of the word: frst, because it is no more
than an expression of interests; secondly, because it dissembles tese interests
behind a mask of impartalty.
I0
From Schehue t Srel
A logical consequence of m ve of ts is tat we c no loner
speak of false conciousnes. Fr now hconsciousnes is inherendj false;
whoever says 'consciousnes' says distorton, delusion, etgement. It is not
that our percepton of te world is sometmes clouded by pasing prejudices
flse soal interest, praatc constint or te myst efect of a
opaque socal stucture. To b concious just i to be deceved. Te mnd
itelfis chroncally distrtng: it i siply a fact about it tt it tveste ad
disfure reality, squint at the world sideways, gps it fom the fali
perspectve of some egoistc deire. The Fal i a up into conounes
not one down to te beasts. Conciouness is just an accidental by-prouct
of the evolutonary process, and it coming wa never prepared for. The
human is alienated fom te world just bcause it can t whic
put it at a disabling distance fom a mindless nature and open up an
unspannable abyss beteen subject and object Reaty is ihospitble to te
mind, and is ultmately opaque to it. we c speak any longer of , ideloy'
at all, it must be i the manner of Fncis Bacon's Novm O
r
anum whc
argues tat some of te 'idols' or false notons whc myst humanity have
their rot deep in te mnd itel
mthe titon fom Hegel to Artur Sopenauer, we can obsere t
drmatc shift of perspectve t place. Hegel's philosophy represent a
last-ditch. eleveth-hour attempt to redeem te world for Reason, st it
fce stery aganst almere intuitonsm; but what in Hegel is the pricple
or Idea of Reason, unrl it sttely proges troug history, h bcome
i Scopenauer te blind, voracious Wil- the empt, iatable hankerng
whic lies at the core of all phenomena Te intelect for Scopenuer is
just a crude, blunder serant of ths iplacble force, twisted out of tue
by it an inerently misrepreentg facult whic beliees itelf pathetcally
to present t as tey really are. What for M and Egels i a spec
social conditon, in whc idea obscure te tue nature of tings, is in
Schopenhauer generalied to te strucrre of te mind as suc And fom a
Mt standpoint, nothing could be more ideologcal t t view tat
all thought is ideolocal. It is a tough Scopenhauer in The Wor a Wil
and Rereentton (1819) does just what he describes te intellect as doing:
ofering as an objectve tt about realit what is in fact te partsn
perspectve of a societ govered increasingly by interest and appette. The
greed, mace and agressiveness of te bourgeois market place are now
simply the way it is with humanty, mysted to a metphysical Wil
Sopenauer stands at te fountaead of a lon taditon of irratonalist
161
I
deolog
thought for which concept are always inefectal and approximate.
icapable of capturing the inefable quality of lived experience. The intellect
caes up the complexity of tat experience into arbitary cunk, freezing
it fuidity into statc categories. Such speculations are rife in Romantcsm.
pass into the 'vitalist' thought of Henri Bergson and D.H. Lawrence. and can
een be glimpsed in the post-structralist oppositon beteen 'metaphysical
closure' and the untnkable play of diference. Athought is thus a form of
alienaton, distancing reality in the very act of ting to seize it. Concepts are
just pale reflecton of the real; but to see concept a 'reflectons' at all i
surely very stnge. To have a concept usiply to b able to use a word i a
patcular wyit i not to be re
g
rttd chat the word 'cofee' lacks the grainy
textre and ric aroma of the actual thing. There i no 'nameless gap' here
beteen te mind and te world. Having a concept is no more lke having
an experience tan throwing a tantrum is like throwing a parry. It is only
because we are tempted to tnk of concepts in empiricist style as 'images' or
'ofrints' of the world that we begin to fret about the eteral rift beteen
the two.
The Will for Schopenhauer is quite fute and purposeles. but shields u
fom a knowledge ofits own utter pointlessness by breeding in us a delusion
kown as the intellect. The intellect obtusely believes life to be meaningful.
whch is just a cunng ruse on the Will's part to keep on perpetatng itsel
It is a though te Will takes pity on our hunger for signifcance and throws
us just enough to be going on with. Like capitalism for Marx, or like the
unconscious for Freud, the Schopenhauerian Will includes its own
dissemblance within itself known to a gullible humanty as reason. Suc
reason i just a superfcial ratonalizing of our desires, but believes itself to be
su1imely disinterested. For Immanuel Kant, the world revealed to us by
'pure' (or theoretcal) reason is just an assemblage of mecstc causal
processes. as opposed to the realm of 'practcal' reason, or morlity, where we
know ourselves to be free, purposive agents. But it is difcult for us to
subsist comortbly i t duality. so Kant looks to aesthetc experience a a
way of bridging it. In the act of aestetc judgement, a piece of te exteral
world momentrily appear to have some kd of purposive point to it. thus
assuagg our rage for meaning.l
Te anttei i Schopenhauer beteen intellect and wis a version of
the later vexed oppositon between theory and ideology. If theory informs us
tat reality lacks all immanent signifcance. then we can only act purpose
flly by suppressing ts gloomy knowledge, which is one meanin of
lZ
Frm Sho
p
enhauer to Sorl
'ideology'. All acton, as we have seen with Nietsche and Althusser, is thus a
sort of fCtoI If for Althusser we cannot act and theorze simultaneously,
for Schopenhauer we have a problem even in waling and talking at the
same tme. Meaning depends on a certain oblivion of our tue condition,
and has its rot sun deeply in non-meanng. To act is to lose the truth at
the very point of trying to realie it. Theory and practce, intellect and will,
can never harmoniously coincide; and Schopenhauer must therefore
presumably hope that nobody who reads his philosophy will be in the least
afected by it, since this would be exactly the kind of instance of theory
trnsforming our interests which he is out to deny.
There is another paradox about Schopenhauer's writing, which it is worth
touching upon briefy. Is that writing the product of the intellect or the will.
of'theory' or 'ideology'? If it is a product of the Will, then it is just one more
expression of that Will's eternal pointlessness, with no more truth or
meang than a rumbling of the gut. But it cannot be a work of the intellect
either, for the intellect is hopelessly estanged from the true nature of things.
The question, in other words, is whether the claim that reason is inherently
falsifing is not a species of performative contradicton, denyng itself in the
very act of assertioI And this is one of the many vexed issues which
Schopenhauer will bequeath to his more celebrated successor, Friedrich
Nietsche.
The reality of tgs for Nietche is not Will but power; but this leaves
reaon in much the same sitaton as it was with Schopenhauer. Reason for
Nietsche is just the way we provisionally carve up the world so that our
powers may best flourish; it is a tool or' serant of those powers, a kind of
specialied functon of our biological drives. A such, it can no more submit
those drives to critical scrutny than can the Schopenauerian intellect take
the measure of the Will whch propels it. Theory canot refect critcally on
the interests of whch it is the expressioI A critque of the faculty of
knowledge', Nietsche proclaims, 'is senseless: how should a tool be able to
critcise itelf when it cn only use itself for te critique?'4 The fact that
Nietsche's own phlosophy would appear to do just that is one of the several
paradoxes he presents us with.
Te mind, then, is just an editng and organizing of the world for certain
pragmatc ends, and it ideas have no more objectve validity than that. All
reaoning is a form of false consciousness, and every proposition we utter is
without excepton untrue. (nte to wht and in contast with what, are
163
Ieolog
tcky logical problems raised by Nietche's work.) Our tought move
witin a largely unconscious framework of needs, interests and desires
founded in the kind of material animals we are, and our tuth claims are
entrely relatve to tis context. The whole of our knowledge, as te
philosopher Marrn Heidegger will later argue, goes on wt some
prctcal, pre-refectve orientaton to the world; we come to self-conscious
ness as beings already prejudiced, engaged, interested. Indeed the word
'iterested' means lterally 'exstng in the midst or; and nobody can exist
anywhere else. For Nietsche and Heidegger as for Mar, we are prctcal
beings before we are theoretcal ones; and in Nietsche's view the noton of
intellectal disinterestedness is itself just a concealed form of interest, an
expression of te racorous malice of those too craven to lve dangerously.
A thought is 'ideological' to te core, the outard mark of stuggle, viol
ence, dominon, the clash of competng interests; and science and philos
ophy are no more than crafty devices by which thought covers over its own
unsavoury sources. Like Mar, Nietsche is out to bring down reason's cred
ulous tust in it own autonomy, scandalously unmasking the blood and toil
in which all noble notons are bom, the basenes and enty at the rot of
our most edifng conceptons.
If reason i a kd of delusion, however, it is a necessary one - for wthout
its deceptve reductons and simplificatons we would never be able to
survive. It is not te i Nietsche's view that there is a tuck bearing down
on me at sixty miles per hour. For one thing, discrete objects such as trucks
are just convenent fctions, ephemeral spin-ofs of the ubiquitous will to
power of which all apparently sold, separate substnces are secretly
composed. Fr anoter ting, the words 'I' or 'me' are equally spurious,
fshioning a deceptvely ongoing identty out of a bundle of centeless
powers, appettes and actons. 'Sixty miles per hour' is just an arbitary way
of chopping up space and tme into manageable chuns, with no ontological
solidity whatsoever. 'Bearing down' is a bit of linguistc interpretton
wholly relatve to the way the human organism and it perceptons have
hstorically evolved. Even so, Nietsche would not be cruel or cavalier
enough to suggest that I shouldn't bother leaping out of the way. Since it is
unlikely that I shall be around much longer if I give too much thought to
these abstse matters while the truck is thundering up, the statement is true
i the pragmatc sense that it seres my survival and well-being.
Te concept of ideology, then, is everywhere at work in Nietsche's
writng, even if the word itself is noe and it is operatve in to diferent
164
From Shopenhauer t Sorel
senses. The frst is te one we have just seen - the ve that ide are simply
deceptve ratonaliatons of passions and interest. There are analogie to
this, a we have noted. i te Marst taditon. at least a far as paricular
ideas are concered. Nietche universalizes to thought a suc what for
Mm is tue of speifc forms of social consciousness. But te altertve
meaning of ideology in Nietsche also fmds some warrant in Marxist teory,
and tis is te concepton of it as 'otherorldliness'. Ideology in this sense
in Nietsce's phiosophy is tat static, dehstoricied relm of metaphysica
values ('soul'. 'tuth', 'essence', 'reality' and the rest) which ofers a false
consolaton for those too abject and unmanly to embrce te will to power
to accept that stuggle, disunity, contadicton, dominaton and ceseles
fu are really all there u.Ideology in tis sense is equivalent to metphysics
- to the spuriously eter verites of science, religion and philosophy. refuge
of te 'nsts' who spur the joy and terror of endless becoming. Te te
world (of metaphysic)', Nietsce comment, using the word 'tue' sardon-.
icly, 'has been erected on a contadicton of te real world';5 a h
thought is here stgly close to Th Geran Ideolog In the teet of suc
anodyne otherorldliess. Nietche speaks up instead for 'life': 'life itelf
is esetially appropriaton. injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker
suppression, hardness, impositon of one's own forms, incorporaton. and at
let. at it mldest. exploitton. . . 'Life', i otr wors, ba a ucn y
resemblance to the capitalist market place. of whch Nietsche's ow
phlosophy, among oter t, is an ideological rtonton.
The belief tat thougt is ideological, a mere ratonalizing expression of
interests and desires, springs from a social order in whch a conict between
sectoral interest is uppermost. It is thus, one might claim, an ideoloy of
its own. If mis obvous enoug in te case of Thoma Hobbes. it is rater
les so in the apparently 'rdical' version of ts case promoted by much
posnoderst theory, whch is deeply in debt to the work of Nietsche. Tat
cae, put i slghtly paroic form rn somewhat a follows Tere is no
suc tng as tth; everythng is a matter of rhetoric and power
viewpoint are relatve; u of 'facts' or 'objectvity' is merely a specious
front for the promotion of specifc interests. The case is usually coupled
with a vague oppositon to the present poltcal set-up, lied to an itene
pesimsm about te hope for any altertve. mits radical Aerican form,
it ocaionl y gos along wth the beef that ay, including lie in a
Sibrian salt-me, is probably preferble to the current American way of
165
Ideolog
life. Those who epound it will tend to be interested in femnism and
'etcity' but not in socialism, and to use terms le 'diference', 'plurality'
and 'margton but not 'class struggle' or 'exploitaton'.
Tat there is sometng in ts position is surely clear. We have seen too
much of the shfty self-interestedness of te 'disinterested' to be much
impresed by it; and we are generally right to suspect that appeals to see the
object as it real y i c be decoded as invitton to see it a our rulers do.
One of te ideological victories of the liberal tradition, m been to equate
objectvity with disinterestedness, forging a powerful interal bond between
the to. We can ony get the world straight if we absolve ourselve of
partcular interests and predilections, viewing it as it would appear if we
were not tere. Some of those properly sceptcal of ts fantsy have then
thown out the baby of objectivity with the bathwater of disinterestedness;
but ts is simply because they have been gullibly convinced that the only
viable meaning of , objectvity' is te one pedalled by ts Arnoldian heritage.
There is no reason t grant ths traditon suc implicit credence: the term
'objectvity' b some perfectly workable meanngs, as anyone who tried to
gve it up for six months would quicly discover. The author of Te Drowned
and the Saved, a memoir of the Nai concentraton camps, wites in his
preface that he will mto discuss the subject wit as muc objectvity as he
can mustr. The author is Primo Lev, supremely non-disinterested victim of
Auschwit; and if Levi wishes to fnd out what really went on in the camps,
it is because he is concered to prevent them from happenng again.
Without needs and interests of some knd, we would see no point in getting
to know anytng in te frst place. Capitalist society is a battleground of
competing interests, and cloaks this incessant violence in the guise of
disinterested ideas. Those postmodernsts who quite properly see trough
this illusion often enough end up pitting against it a 'radical' version of the
very markt-place behaviour it conceals. In espousing a rich plurality of
contending viewpoints and idioms as a good in itself they tr an idealied
version of that market-place reality against the monistc certitdes whic
help to hold it in place, thus seeking to undermine one part of capitalist
logc with anoter. It uthen no wonder that their 'radica' politcs are a little
stined and bleak, or at the worst (one thinks of Jean Baudrllard and Jean
Francois Lyotard) entirely vacuous.
Te claim that the whole of our thought moves witin the frame of
certain practcal, primordial'. pre-reflectve interests is surely just. But the
concept of ideology ha traditonally meant a good dea more than this. It is
166
From Shopenhauer to Sorel
not just out to afrm that ideas are inscribed by interests; it draws attention
to the ways in which secic ideas help to legitimate unjust and unnetessar
forms of politcal domination. Statements like 'It's JUSt coming up to three'
o'clock' are certy taced tough with social interest, but wheter tey
are 'ideological' or not depends on their functoning within partcular
power-stuctures. The postmoderst move of expanding the concept of
interests to encompass the whole of social life, while valid enough in itself
ten seres to displace attenton from these concrete politcal stuggles,
collapsing them into a neo-Nietschean cosmos in which throwing off an
overcoat is secretly just as much a matter of confict and domination as
overthrowng the stte. If all thought is 'interested' to its roots, then - so it
can be argued - te knds of power-struggles to which. say, socialists and
femnist have taditonally drawn attenton have no ver special status. A
'scandalous' vision of te whole of socety as one restless will to power, one
irresolvable turmoi of embattled perspectves, thus seres to consecrate the
political sttus qu.
Wat ths move involves, in effect, is the confating of to quite differ
ence senses of 'interest'. On the one hand, there are those 'deep' sorts of
interest whic stucture our very form oflife and provide the ver matrix of
our knowledge - the interest we have, for example, in viewing tme as
moving forards rather than backwards or sideways, which we can hardly
imagine ourselves out o On the other hand there are interests like wanting
to explode a small nuclear weapon over Fidel Castro's holiday villa, which
we can quite easily imagine ourselves out o The efect of running these two
kinds of interests together is to 'natralize' the latter by lending them
something of the ineluctable status of the former. It is true that the mind
cannot critcally examine a sort of interest which is fundamentaly consttu
tive of it - tat ts really would be a case of trying to haul ourselves up by
our own botstraps. It is not tue, however, that an interest in blasting fidel
Castro into eterty cannot be submitted to rtional critique; and the efect
of the postmoderist expansion of 'interest', as in the work of Michel
Foucault is to elde this vital distncton.
A prime instance of this gambit can be found in the work of the
American neo-pragmatst Stanley Fish. Fish argues that the whole of our so
called knowledge comes down to belief that these beliefs, at least while we
are experiencing them, are ineluctable, in the sense tat I cannot choose not
to beleve what I beleve; and that 'theor', far from being capable of making
a difference to our belief, i just a rhetorically persuasive style of artcu-
167
Ideolog
lacng them. ' It is not hard to recogne i tis cae tace of the
Schopenauerian relaton between intellect and Will, or the Nietschean
priorty of power over reason. But it is curious, for one tng, to claim that
a knowledge is a queston of belief For the philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein, it would make no sense to say that l belee tat I have two
hands, any more than it would make sense to say that I doubtd it. There is
simply no context here, usually at lease, in which the words 'belef or 'doubt'
could have force. If however, I wake up after an operaton in which there
wa a rk tat one of my hands might be amputated, and the patent in the
next bd is brutal enough to enquie whether I stlhave two hd lmght
take a cautous peep under the bedclothes at these heavly bandaged objects
and reply: 'I believe so'. Here there woul be a context in which the tem
'belef would have real force; but it is idle otherwise to tnk that this kind
of knowledge involves 'believing' anything at all.
By r all of our belefs on the same level, as forces which grip us
ineluctably, Fish takes up a reactonary politcal stance. For te effect of d
drastc homogening of diferent modes and degrees of belief as in the case
of interests, is to natrale beliefs such a 'Women should b teated a
serants' to the status of 'beliefs' like: 'Vienna is te capitl of Austia'. The
superfcially 'radical' appeal of te case is that te latter kind of propositon
is no metaphysical tt but merely an instittonal interpretaton; it
reactonary corollary is that the former sort of belief is made to appear quite
as immune to ratonal reflecton as the claim about Vienna.
Fish has thus set the situaton up to prove in advance m claim that
teoretcal refecton can make no whit of dif erene to what belefs we
acrually have. For ts claim is otherwise distnctly implausible, involving as
it does an untenably strong denal of the ways in which critcal thought
quite commonly helps to modif or even tansform our interest and desires.
I may come to see that my current interests are i fct uneasonable, sering
as tey do to obstuct the more valid interests of others; and i I am feelng
suitably heroic I may alter or abandon them accordingly. This may happen
i partcular if my attenton is drawn to certain genetc or functonl apect
of my beliefs - where they spring from, and what social efects they breed -
of whch lwas previously ignorant None of ts, of course, is lely to ocur
uthe model for Ubelief is something lie 'Snow is white', and Fish's case is
thus pointlessly self-onrming.
Perhaps te problem is that subjectng beliefs to ratonal critque would
seem to demand occupying some 'transcendental' vantagepoint beyond
168
From Schophauer to Sorel
them Mchel Fucault Ld lte te for suc cera; but ts. does not
appear to have prevented him fom holding that imprisonng homosexuals
i not te most enghtened way of relat to them. Te view tat critcal
refecton entils locatng oneself in some metaphysical outer space,
sublely abolved fom alinterest of one's own is JUSt a tedious bugbear
wth whic those who wish for their own ideological reason to deny the
possibility of such refecton seek to rattle those who do not. And the
assumpton that without such a God's-e view we are left with noting but
an arry of partal perspectves, any one of whic is as good as any oter, is
simply a kind of inverted metaphyics. Those who imagne that if tth i
not absolute then tere is no trut at aare simply closet tanscendentt,
helplesly in talto te very case they reect. A Rchrd Rotty bpointed
out absolutely nobody is a relatvist in the sense of believing tat any view
of a partcular topic is as god as any oter.8
Cery fish himself is not in ts sense a relatvst but he does seem to
mthat critcally egone's beliefs involve catapultn oneself into
outer space. It would C that
the individual who wa conttuted by historical and cultrl forces [would
have to} 'see thrugh' the forces and tus stnd t the side of his own
convictons and bliefs. But tat is the one thing a historcally conditoned
consiousness canot do, conduct a ratonal exination of its own convic
tons . . . it could only do that ifit were not historically conditoned and wer
intead an acontextual or uituated entty . . -
The self for Fish, as muc a for the most shamelessly vulgar Mm ute
helplesly determined product of hstory, a mere puppet of its social
intrests; and tere is then nothing between such iron determinsm on te
one hand and a plainy vacuous transcendentalism on te oter. We are
either totally constned by our soial context, or not constned at In
a typical posoodemist sleight of hand, al of our beliefs are made to appear
as fundamentally conttutve of te self a te 'belief' tat I have to hnds,
so that it follows as logical y that reaon is unable to round upon them as it
does that te eye cannot see itself seeing somethi. But this is only because
fish's relentlessly monistc vision of tngs expels all contradicton from
bot self and world, terrfed a it is of the slightet whif of ambiguity or
indetermnacy. Cultural contexts are assumed to be untary, so tat, say, a
product of the white Sout Aican ruling class must inevitably endorse the
169
Ieolog
doctrine of aparteid. But te Sout Afrcan social contet is of course
complex ambiguous and self-contradictory, composed of precious liberal
and radical traditons as well as of racist ones; and an upper-class whte in
tose conditons may tus fnd te racist values 'naturally' bred in hm at
war with a critical stance towards them. Faced wit ths argument, Fish will
tke a smart step bacwards and point out tat te individual in question is
ten te determined product of this whole confictve sitaton, unable to
tn hmself outside his inexorably constraining politcal ambivalence; but
dwnot retieve te fatal concession he hthen made to a radical case.
Fr a radical does not need to deny this in the least he or she just want to
claim tat we can submit interests and beliefs, whether our own or others, to
critcal scrutny. Tere is no need to imply tat this is done from outside the
fmework of any belief whatsoever. Perhaps further refecton will then
lead te Sout Afcan to be critcal of his own ambivalence. and so come to
oppose aparteid wholeheartedly. Fish's cae fais because it grants far too
much to te politcal left he is out to discredit. A long as we are able to
bring down apateid, we are really not terrbly bothered about the fact that
we c only accomplish this project from the stndpoint of some belief
system or other in fact it never occurred to us to deny it. Fish wants to worst
te politcal left i order to protect te American way of life; but rather u
critcaly engage wt the left's cae. he tries in a hubristc gesture to
undercut it completely by denying that emancipatory crtique can ever get
of te ground. But t is only because he msurrepttously subsumed all
interests and beliefs to te stats of tose which are indeed so utterly
consttutve of the self so fundamentally the grounds of its very historical
possibility, tat te case proves itsel It is as though my belief tat Indian tea
i more pleaant tan Chinese - a belief I hold loosely, provisionally and
indiferenty - is imbued with all te immutable force of the Kantan
categories.
Une Fish, Marxsm does not hold tat te self is an impotent refex of
its hstorical conditons. On te contary, what consttutes a human subject
a a subject is precisely it ability to tansform its own soial determinant -
to make sometng of that which makes it. Men and women, as Mar
observed, make their own hstory on the basis of anterior conditons; and
both parts of the statement, constttng and consttuted, must be allowed
equal weight. An historical being is one ceaselessly 'out ahead' of itself
radicaly 'excessive' and non-self-identcal, able witin certin deHte
constraints to pose its own existence as problematc. And it is eacdy in t
170
Frm Shoehaue t Sre
structral gap or lag beteen the actal and the possible tat emacipatory
critque can take hold. Fr Fish, however, radicalism is an impossible
enterprise; for either my critcal obserations on the current power-system
are intelligble to that system, i whch case they are simply one more move
wtn it and tus not radical at all; or they are not, in whch case they are so
much irrelevant noise. Ironically, Fish is a sort of 'ult-leftist' who believes
tat all 'te' radicalism is some unimaginable anarchsm, some 'alternative
universe' logic wholly at variance wth the present and he therefore suffers
from what Lenn rebuked as an infantle disorder. But of course it is denitive
of any efective radicalism that it engages with the terms of the given system,
precisely in order to subvert it. If it did not, then there would be no question
of subversion at all. Nobody can ever really disagree with Stanle Fish - for
either he understnds what you say, in which case you are not disagreeing
with hm at all; or he does not, in which case your views belong to some
problematc wholly incommensurable with his own. And such incommen
surbility re out the possibility of bot agreement and disagreement.
What Fish's position at all costs must deny, in other words, is the notion
of immanent critique. If he were to countenance for a moment what Kr
Mar did to te bourgeois politcal economists, hs case would fall instantly
to the ground. Fr Marxism regards rationality neither as some ahstorical
absolute, nor as the mere refex of curent powers and desires. Instead, it
seeks to occupy te categories of bourgeois society from within, in order to
highlight tose points of interal confict, indetermicy and contradicton
where its own logic might be led to surpass itsel It is just this strategy whch
Mar adopted with the bourgeois economist, with whom he most certinly
shared a categorial logic; unless he and Adam Smith are both in some sense
talking about capitalism, then there is no sense i which Mar's case const
tutes a crtique of Smith's. But only some rhetorical ultra-lefsm could then
imagine that Mar and Smith are much of a muchness, and the former is not
'truly' radical at all. If ths is the view of a Fish, it was certainly not the view
of the bourgeois politcal economists, and neiter is it te view of US Steel.
Postoder thought would seem to have fallen for the sterile antithesis that
'reason must eiter stand wholly on the inside of a form of life, guiltily
complicit with it, or lurk at some illusory Archimedean point beyond it. But
ths is to assume tat this form of life is not somehow inherently contra
dictory, comprisin at once beliefs and interests wholly 'interal' to it, and
other forms of discourse and practce which run counter to its ruling logic.
The much-vaunted 'pluralism' of posonodern theory is curiously monistc
l/I
Ideolog
on m score. Radical political tought, in the best decontctve manner,
seeks to locate itself neiter wholly inside nor wholly outside the given
system, but, so to speak, in that system's very internal contadictons, in the
places where it is non-identical with itelf in order to elaborate from tem a
politcal logic which mght ultmately tansform te power-stuctre as a
whole. Marxism take with the utmost serousness bourgeois society'S mof
freedom. justce and equality, and enquires with fu naivety why it is that
these grandiloquent ideals can somehow never actually enter upon material
existence. Fish, of course, will then remnd us yet again that althi implies
some vantage-point of belief which we cannot occupy and not occupy
simultaneously but it is hard to know who exactly ever thought we could.
The lat thing Marxism b ever credited is the fantasy that tuth is
somehow unstorcal.
It is worth adding that Fish's assumption that in order to critcize my
beliefs and desires I must stnd entirely to one side of them is a hanover
from Kantan purtnism. Fr Kant morl self-refecton or practcal reaon
must b wholly independent of interest and inclinaton; for Astotle, by
contast, a certain critcal refecton of one's desire is actally a potental
wtn it. Par of what is involved for Astotle in lv virtously - living,
tat is to say, in the rich fourishing of one's creatve powers - is to be
motvated to reflect on precisey this process. To lack such self-awareness
would be in Astotle's view to fall short of true virtue, and so of tue
happiness or well-being. Te virtues for Astotle are organed states of
desire; and some of these desires move us to curve back critcally upon them.
Aristotle thus deconstuct Fish's rigorous antthesis of interest and critcal
thought - an antthesis whic crops up in Fish's work as no more than a
negatve form ofKantanism.
It is clear enough, then, what a 'radical' pragmatsm or neo-Nietscean
ism fnally comes down to. It comes down to a shamefaced apologia for the
Wester way of life, more rhetorically suasive dsome eplicitly redneck
propaganda on beklf of te Pentagon. We begn with a proper dismissal of
disinterestedness, a suspicion of objectivity and an apparently hard-nosed
insistence on te realites of incessant conflict, and end up playing
obediently into the hands of Henr Kissinger. In some such styles of
tnkin. a transcendentalism of tth is merely ousted by a trancendentlism
ofinterest Interests and desires are just 'given'. the baeline which our
theorizing can never glimpse behnd; they go, so to speak all the way down,
and we can no more inquire where the actually come from tan we could
172
F
om
&hoh4u t
usefully ask te Enlig
tenment ideologues about te sources of tei ow
Olympian ratonity. In msene, very litte h canged from te days of
Thomas Hobbes, even if suc a standpoint is now commonly associated wit
politcal dissent rater t wit supportg te absolutst stte. Mism, by
contast bone or to t to say abut te conditon whic al y
genete our Ointret - sy it in a highy 'intreted' way.
What i projected by postlodesm as a unversally valid relaton
beteen knowledge and interst is in fact fairly specc to te bourgeoi
epoc. For Astode, as we have seen te refectve decsion to flfl a desire
is par of tt desire itelf and our desires can tu bcome reaon for acton.
We can speak in msene of ' mindfl desire' or 'desiri mnd', in contast
wit a later ther like Kant for whom our desires and moral decision
must b kept rigorously separate.1O Once a deire h become a reason for
acton, however, it ceases to rema identcal wit itelf it i no longer
simply some blind unquestonable cause. but enters into our dicoue d
undergos signifcant tranfonaton Fr some postmodersm, however,
interest and desires would appear to be curiously self-identcal; it is
Aristode who emerges i m ligt as more deconstctve t te
deconstrctonists. Those who regad reaon as no more tn te intument
of interet. in a tme-hallowed burgeois tditon, sometmes seem to
assume tat it is self-ident what excdy our iterests are. The problem is
promotng them, not defning tem. A stage ne kd of positvism tus
comes to birt, for whic it is now desire and interet no longer brte
sense-dara. whc c be taken a obvious. But we do not of course alwys
spontneously know what is in our bet interet since we are not
tnsparent to ourelve. Reason is not only a way of pragmatcl y
promotg our desire, but of workg out wht desires we actally have
and how valid. enhancg and productve they are i reaton to the desire
of oters. It is in t sene tat te classical concept of reon is intmately
ted to te concept of social justce. We hve an interest, a Kant remarked,
i reason - an interest in clar our real intert. A m is anoter
sense i whic reson and passion are not simply to be counterposed a
oppoite.
Reason is commonly tougt to be on te side of disinterestedness and
ttlt. seeing lfe steadiy and seeing it whole. Remove t faculty, and al
we appear to b let with is a clash of sectoral stpoit, no one of whic
c be judged more valid t anoter. We have noted aleady tat suc
relatvism i no more t a wl0' te wisp: nobody in fact believe it for a
1 73
Idolog
moment, as an hour's casual obseration of ther behaviour w readily
atest. But the idea persists tt reason is a global afair of seeing thng
dispassionately in te round, whereas interest are stubbory local and
partcular. Either we are so deeply 'in te midst' of thngs, embroiled in d
or tht specifc preoccupaton, that we could never hope to grasp our situa
ton as a whole; or we can stve to judge this maelstom of partal view
point from te outide, only to discover that we are standing in empty
space. This, i efect, is the double bind genl y ofered us b a whole aray
of contemporary theorst (Hans-Georg Gadamer and Richard Rorty may
sere as suitably diverse instances), who place under prohibiton any attempt
to launch a critque of a whole way of life.H (hether this case folows fom
a cogent or tendentous reading of the later Wittenstein is a contoversial
issue; certainy the later Wittgenstein greeted the whole form of life known
as Great Brtain with undisguised disapproval.) Once again, an apparendy
radical case veers on its axis here into a covertly conseratve one: a
'materialist' stess on the rootednes of our ideas in practcal interests,
ofensive to a soial order which considers thought to be nobly neutral, is
also a grim caveat tat any attempt to grasp soiety as a totality involves a
chimercal tcendentalism. Both emphaes follow logicaly enough from
a Nietcean reading of the world.
We have seen already sometng of the radical rposte to this positon. It
is not as though there are some theorists who fnd themselves spontaneously
t in grandly global terms, while other more modest, les megalo
manac conuentators prefer to stck to the irreducibly plural and concretely
partcular. It is rather that there are certain kinds of concretely partcular
so iterets whch could not hope to realize their ends witout pasi
over at some point into a critcal inquiry into the stucture of society as a
whole. To forestall this alarming possibility you have simply to argue, like
Margaret Tatcer or Eresto Ladau, that 'society as a whole' dos not exst.
It is not that such stubbornly partcular interets 'leave themelves behnd',
so to speak. in tis shift to a more global analysis. abandonng their own
partisn perspectve for some grandly disinterested view. It is rather that
without suc more structural theorizing they cannot even be in effective
possesion of themselve. Some more general kind of critique is constrained
by te very logic of these specifc concer. Thus it is tht an oppresed
group or class -women, te proletariat, etc minorites, colonized peoples
ad the rest - may come to recognie tat without graspig somethng of
their own material locaton within a wider system, they will never be efect-
I71
Frm Shopehau t Sorel
ively able to reale their hghly specifc interet in emancipaton. Most
Wester theorist who deny or fail to see ts point are located in materal
situatons known as Wester unversites, where there is no compelling
reaon, much of the tme at leasr to boter one's head about suc rebarba
tve abstacton or 'teroristc totalites' as ipersm Others are not qute
so luck. In t sense it i false to counterpose loal interests to global
totty any theory of the latter is quite as 'interested' as a campaig to
reloate an airport. To speak simply of a 'plurality of interest', ran from
blac in er-city populaton to model aicraft bufs, then merely obscures
ths oCpoint.
If tere are no ratonal grounds on which to adjudicate beteen
competng social interest, ten te conditon we are left wth is a violent
one. Eiter I just have to fght you for my position, or I deploy tat more
subtle form of dominaton enthusiastically urged by Fish, which is
sophistcal rhetoric. This vision of embattled viewpoints slogging it out, each
stving to linguistcally outdo the other, is very masculinst. It i also
politcally obtuse: for te fact is that, under capitalist conditon, no univeral
engagement of opposed positons can even get off the ground. It is possible
to see a radical interest as just one among many in the theoretical market
place; but though tis is tue enough i one sense, it is misleading in
another. For the 'interest' of the radical is just to bring about the kind of
soial conditons in whic all men and women could genuinely partcipate
in the formulation of meanings values, wthout exclusion or domina
ton The liberal pluralist is not wron i seeing such an open dialogue of
diferences as a desirable goal; he or she is just mystfed to think tat it
could ever be adequately conducted in a class-divided society, where what
count as a acceptable interest in the frrst place is determned by the ruln
power. Such partcipatory, socialist democratic instittons could b created
only once such a power has been overthrown. and along wth it the species
of sophstcal 'mental violence' espoused by a Stanley Fish. A to what
meanngs and values might result from dcomradely encounter of difer
ences, the radical has absolutely nothing to say, since his or her whole poli
tcal commitment is exhausted in the efort to bring about its hstorcal
conditons of possibility.
The most illustrious inheritor of the tradition of Schopenauer and
Nietsche is Sigmund Freud. Like his precursors. Freud is out to demon
strate the ftulness and fagility of reason, its dependence upon some
175
Ieolog
more fndamental set of forces. Te place radically 'oter' to reason whc
Scopenauer names Will is for Freud te unconscious; but the unconscious
can be seen just as well a a decontrction of the oppositon between reason
and itct, rather as Nietsche sometmes sees te intellect a a faculty
interal to te will to power. The ratonal ego is a kind of organ or
outcropping of the unconscious, that piece of it which u tured to the
eter world; and in this sense our ideas have their complex roots in the
bodily drives. Indeed the ipulse to knowledge is itself for Freud secrety
libidinal, a sublimated form of sexual curiosity to which he gives the name
'epistemophilia'. To know, for Freud as for Nietsce, is inseparable from the
will to dominate and possess. The very distnction between knowing subject
and knowable object, the ground of all epistemology, m it bais in our
infantle le: under the sway of the so-called pleaure principle, te small
infant expels certai objects from itself in fantastc form. tus consttutng
an external world, and 'intojects' certain oters to form te basis of an ego.
Aof our later knowledge w be carried on within te frame of tese more
primary attacments and aversions: our ideas move within te context of
deire, and there is no thought or percepton without its admixture of
unconscious fantasy. Fr Freud, all cognition contains miscogniton, all
il uminaton is overshadowed by a certain blindness. Wherever we uncover
meaning, ten we can be sure to fnd non-meanng at its root.
Seen in ts ligt Freud's witngs are faitul to the cental contenton of
te taditon we are examinin - that te mind itel is constituted by a
chronc distorton or alienaton, and that 'ideology' is thus it natura habitat
False consciousness is no accident whic aficts the intellect in the form of
passing prejudice; it is not te result of mystficaton or false social interest.
On te contry, it was there from te very beginning, lodged deep withn
te structure of our perceptons. Desire infUtates our routne projects,
causi them to swere, fter, miss the mark. Fase consciousness i tus les
some specific body of belief tan, in Freud's own phrase, the 'psycho
patology of everyday life'.
In tis sense, we might say that Freud's teory of ideology (though the
term itselfis hardly present in his work) is of an Althusserian cast. Indeed we
have seen already that it is fom Freud himself via the detour of Lac a, tat
Altusser derives his noton of ideology as 'lived relatons', whic exist
largely at the level of the unconscious and involve an inescapable structure
of miscognition. Just a i Althusser's thought the subject of ideology exist
only through ignorance of its true conditons, so the paradox of Freud, as we
I/
From Shopenhaur t Sorel
have seen is tht te subject comes into beig only on te basis of a mas ive
repression of it own unconscious determnants. Oblivion is thus our
'natural' moe, and rememberig usimply forgettng to forget The
ground
of N our insight, ten, is some primordial opaqueness to ourselve: te
unconscious produces te ego, but must necessarily be absent fom it if te
ego is to functon efectvely. Much te same can be said in Atusser's cae
about te relatons beteen subjet and society, where the latter operates as
the 'absent cause' of the forer. And m, on the surface at least, is eceed
ingly gloomy news. If our knowledge is just a functon of our self-opacity,
how can we hope to achieve the kinds of inights which might set us free?
How can tere be a 'tuth of the subject', ute subject loses itself in te very
act of emerging into being?
We can put te problem in diferent ters. Psychoanalysis is a discourse
which stve to engage refectvely wit the aratonal; and a such it sugget
tht ultmate impossibility of all 'ideology critique'. Fr to the extent to
which such a discourse is 'ratonal', it opens up a disabling gap between itelf
and its object; and to the extent to whch it simply reproduces the language
of desire. it would seem to forfeit claims to uncoveri it hidden mechan
isms. The critque ofideology walways be doged by tis impase or aporia.
in which to 'understnd' te slippery signifers it examnes is to be in tht
instant eluded by tem. The Freud who doubted that there was ever any
gettng to the botom of a dream, who pointed to the role of the analyst's
own desires ('countertansference'), and who came i later life to speculate
that the teoretcal constrcts of the analyst were perhaps as much
convenient fctons as the fantsies of the patent, appears to have been
conscious enough of te bafing nature of hs own enterprise But tere is
also another Freud, whose tust in the ultmate efcacy of reason rns
somewhat counter to this sceptcism. To put the matter in Marxist tenns: u
Freud is thusserian' in m awareness of the chronic mscognitons of
everyday life, he also shares somethng of the Enlightenment view of such
false concousness of the early Marx and Engels. And the exemplary
Freudian tet for m 'enlightened' critque of ideolog is his late enquiry
into religion Th Future o an Illuion
Religion, in Freud's opinion, fulls the role of reconc men
women to te instctal renunciatons which cviaton force upon them.
In compensat them for such sacrifces, it imbues an otherise harsh
purposeless world with meang. It is tus. one mght claim, the very
paradigm of ideology, providing an imagnary resoluton of real conta-
171
Ieolo
dictons; and were it not to do so, individuals might wel rebel againt form
of civilizaton which exacts so much from them. In TFutur o an Illuion
Freud contemplates the possibility that religion is thus a socially necessary
myt a indispensable means of containing politcal disafection; but he
considers ts possibility only to reject it. In the most honourable Enlighten
ment taditon, and despite alm elitst fear of the insenate mases, Freud
cn ot bring hmself to accept that mystfcaton must be an eteral condi
ton of humanty. Te idea that a minority of phlosophers like hmself may
acnowledge the unvarshed tt while the mass of men and women
must continue to be te dupes of illusion, is offensive to his ratonal
humanism. Whatever good historical purpose religion may have sered in
the 'primtive' evolution of the race, the tme has now come to replace this
myth wth the 'ratonal operaton of the intellect', or wth what Freud term
'educaton in reality'. Like Gramsci, he holds that the secularized, demy
thologized world view which has so far been largely the monopoly of the
intelectals must be disseminated a the 'common sense' of humity as a
whole.
To dismiss tis hope as the dream of some dewy-eyed ratonlist would
be to evade the courage and challenge of Freud's tet. Fr no modem thinker
is more bleakly aware of the exteme precariousness of human reason - of
the grim tuth, as he comments in this work, that 'arguments are of no avail
aginst (human) passions', and that 'even in present-day man purely reaon
able motves can efect little against passionate impulsions'P Fr hs wary
sceptcsm of the claims of reason, however, Freud has the imaginaton to ask
helf whether unreason must always inevitbly reign. The intellect he
remark, may be powerless in comparison wth the instnctual life; but
though its voice is a 'soft' one, it does not rest untl it has gained a hearing.
'The primacy of the intellect', he writes, 'lies, it is true, in a distant future,
but probably not in an infnitl
y
distt one' (238). Nothig, he claim, c i
the long run wthstnd reason and experience, and the afront which
relgion ofers to both i altoo palpable. In the teeth of hs own conseratve
alarm at the smoulderingly rebellious masses, Freud remains loyal to the
democratic kerel of mystfed Enlightenment ratonalitY. There is no doubt
i t work at least as to whether it is such ratonality, or a sceptcal view of
it which is on the side of politcal progressivism.
Relion for Freud is a sublimaton of our lowly drives to higher spiritual
ends; bit so in fact is 'culture' or civiliton as a whole. 'Having recognised
relious doctes as ilusions', he writes,
l/8
Frm &hophauer t Sorl
we are at once faced
by a
frther queston: may not other cultural asset of
whic we hold a hgh opinion ad by whic we let our live be rled be of a
simlar nature? Must not the asumptons that determine our politcal regul
aton be caled iluion as well? ad is it not te case that in our civilisaton
the .relations beteen the sexe are distrbed by an erotic illusion or a
number of such illusions? (216)
Once one embarks on this line of thought, where will it end? Could it not,
Freud muses, extend to reasoning and obseration themselves? What if
science itself were just another such sublimaton? And what of the science
known as Freudian psychoanalysis? The concept of sublimaton is clearly
gettng out of hand, and Freud no sooner raises these embarrassing questions
than he closes them peremptorily of Lacking the means for undertaking so
comprehensive a task. he modestly informs us, he will concentrate instead
on the topic in hand.
Freud closes down te discussion, in short,just before it manoeuvres him
into his own version of the Marxist doctrine of base and superstructure. In
ortodox Marst fashion, he informs us elsewhere tat te basic motvation
of social life is economic: civiliation is just a cumbersome device for
inducing men and women to do what they spontaneously detest, namely
work. We are all naturally bone idle, and without this superstructure of
sanctons and cajolement we would just lie around all day in various
interestng states of jouisance. Ths is not, of course, exactly Mar's own
point: te legal, politcal and ideological superstructre of societ, for him at
least, is a conequence of the seldivided nature of the economic 'base' in class
conditons - of the fact tat economic exploitaton needs to be socially
legitmated. It does not just follow from the unversal injuncton to labour.
But Freud is aware that labour, at least in this kind of societ, entails the
renouncing of instinctual gratifcaton; and the 'superstucture' of civilia
ton, or 'culture'; must therefore either coerce or cajole us into buckling
down to the business of material reproduction. Freud's thought here is
impeccably Gramscian: the means by whic society is perpetuated, so he
informs us, are' 'measures of coercion and other measures that are intended
to reconcile men (to their material destiny) and to recompense them for
teir sacrfces. Tese latter may be described as te mental assets of civilisa
ton (189). Or - in Gramsci's own terms - the insttutons of hegemony.
Culture for both thinkers is an amalgam of coercive and consensual
mechansms for reconciling human subjects to their unwelcome fate as
179
Ieolog
labourng animals in oppressive conditons.
The problem in Freud's view is that suc hegemonic processes can
quickly become self-defeatng. We sublimate our otherise anti-social
instncts into cultural ideals of one kind or another, which sere to unif a
rce of predatory egoists who would oterwise be at each other's troats. But
these ideals can then become tyrannically excessive in teir demands,
demanding more instncral renunciaton than we can properly manage and
so causin us to fall ill of neurosis. Moreover, ths hegemony is threatened a
soon as it becomes clear that some are being forced into more renunciaton
than others. In ts situaton. Freud comments, a 'permanent stte of
discontent' will persist in society and may lead to 'dangerous revolt'. the
satisfaction of te minorty depends on the suppression of te majority, ten
it is understndable that the latter will begin to manifest a justable
hostlity' to the culrre which their labour makes possible, but in which they
have too meage a share. A crsis of hegemony will consequently ensue; for
hegemony is established by men and women interalizing te law whic
governs tem, and ih conditons of flagrant inequality 'an interalisa
ton of the cultural prohibitons among the suppressed people is not to b
expected' (191). 'It goes without saying', Freud adds, 'that a civilisaton which
leaves so large a number of its partcipants unsatsfed and drive them into
revolt neither mnor deseres the prospect of a lastng existence' (192).
The mechansm by which the law of society is interlized is known a
te superego. The superego is te voice of autority within us all, no longer
an exterlly imposed power but the very ground of our personal conscience
and moral idealism. Once power has inscribed itself within the very form of
our subjectivty, any insurecton against it would seem to involve a sel
tansgression. To emancipate ourselves from ourselves - the whole purpose
of Freud's therapeutc project -ua much more difcult afair than thowng
of some merely exterl model of dominion. In the formaton of te
superego or Name-of-te-Father, power comes to entwne itself wth the
roots of te unconscious, tapping someting of its awesome, implacable
energy and directin d force sadistcally against te ego itsel If politcal
power is as recalcitrant as it is, then it is partly because the subject has come
to love and desire the very law which subjugates it in te erotc perersion
kown as masochsm. 'e suppressed classe', Freud writes, 'can be
emotonally attached to teir masters; in spite of teir hostlity to them they
may se in them their ideals' (193); and ts, psychically spe is one
secret of te tenacity of politcal dominaton
I80
From &hophur t Sorl
M te law our own, however, w not reolve te problems of
civton Our appropriaton of it will always be a pa ambivalent
afair - whic is to say in Freudian parlance tat te Oedipus complex is
neer fully dissolved. If we love and desire te law. we also nurture an
intense animosity towards it, reoicing in seeing tis august autority
brought low. Ad since te law itself is crel, sadistc and tncal, it drive
our agression back upon ourselves and ensures tat for every renunciaton
of satsfaction we are plunged deeper into neurotc guilt. In ths sense, te
power which sustains civiaton also helps to undo it, stoking up witin u
a culture of lethal self-hated. Te law is obtuse as well a brutal: it is not
only vengefuL paranoid and vindictve, but utterly insensitve to te fct tat
it insanely excessive demands could not possibly be fulflled. It is a form of
high-mnded terrorism, whic will simply rub our noses in our failure to
live up to it rather than show us how to placate it Before te law we are
always in te wrong: like some imperious monarch, te superego 'does not
trouble itself enoug about te fcts of the mental consttuton of human
beings. It issues a comand and does not ask wheter it is possible for
people to obey it.' 13 Ts fanatcal power is out of contoL driving men and
women to madness and despair; and Freud, who regarded te law as one of
hs oldest enenues, sees it as one of psychoanalysis to temper its deat
dealing rgour.
It might be tought tat men and women would naturally be driven to
rebel againt any autority a cruel a te superego. Btey do not commony
do so, it is beuse in Freud's vc te superego m it rot i te |d or
unconscious, closer to the unconscious than is the eo itelf Our submission
to the law, in other words. is spurred on by strong instnctual forces, which
bind us libidl y to it The paradox. then, is tat te very unconscious
energies whc fel te superego's despotsm are also tose which drive us to
embrace it and this can be seen as deconstl ctng the Gramscian oppositon
of coercion and consent. What makes te law so coercive - te powerful
unconscious ipulsion behind it brtality - belong with te erotc drive
whc lead us to consent to it
If 'clture' in Freud's eyes is a matter of sublimaton, compenaton and
imanary resoluton. ten it is really synonymous with one inuental
concept of ideology. But Freud's vew of civton is also ideological in a
diferent sense. For m,as much a for Thomas Hobbe or Jeremy Bentham,
tere is an eter enmity between te rutessly self-gratfng individual
and te demands of society. Men and women are naturally self-seeking,
8I
Idolog
dominatve and agressive, monstrous predators who can be dissuaded out
of mutual injury only by the prohibitons of authority, or by the bribery of
some altertve yield of pleasure. Freud h litte or no concepton of
human society as nourshn as well as constainng - as a place of reciprocal
sel-fIment as well as a mecanism for keeping u from eac other's
throat. H vew of bot indivdual and soiety, in short, is classicaly
bourgeois: te indivdual as an isolated monad powered by its appettes,
society as some mere contactual dece without which libidinal anarchy
would be let loose. Given this cynical market-place morality, it is hardly
surprising tat the 'culture' whic is meant to regulate and reconcile
individuals i rveale as alay fagile in contrast to their insatiable lust
to plunder and possess. Freud's psychoanalytc theory is not fmally dis
soiable fom the politics of hs social class, and like bourgeois politcal
economy is inscribed at key point by these prejudices. It universalzes a
partcular vew of 'man' to global status; and much the same can be said of
te later version of the teory whch is the scool of Jacques Lacan.
Whatever stiking insights Lcan's work has undoubtedly to ofer, there is
surely no doubt that its view of the human subject as a mere efect of some
inscrutable Other, its scor for the whole concept of political emancipaton,
and its contemptuous dismissal of human history as little more than a
'sewer', has had its part to play in tat jaundiced. disenchanted post-war ethos
whch goes under te name of the 'end of ideology'.
Whatever Feud's fnal tust in humn reason, he is plainly not a ratonalist
as fr as psychoanalytic practice goes. He does not believe that a patent could
ever be cured simply by offering him a theoretcal account of his ills. To this
extent, Freud is at one wit Mar: the point is not to interpret the world. but
to cge it. Neurosis is to be dispelled not by displacng its 'falsity' wit
some intellectual tt but by tackling the material conditions which give
birth to it in the frst place. For mas for Mar, theory is pointless unless it
comes to interene as a tanformatve force within actual experience. Fr
Mar the opposite of an oppressive ideology is not in the end teory or an
altertve ideology, but politcal practce. For Freud. te alternatve to
psychc disorder is te scene of analysis itelf. within which the only tth
tat matters is that which gets constucted in the interplay between analyst
and analysand. Like politcal practce, the scene of analysis is an actve
'staging' or working through of conficts. a 'theatricalizing' of certain urgent
real-life issues in which the practcal relatons of human subjects to those
I8Z
From &hopehauer t Sorel
problems is crucally tansfigured. Both revolutionary practce and the scene
of analysis involves the painful constructon of a new identit on the ruins of
the old, whic is to be recollected rater than repressed; and in both cases
'theory' comes down to an altered practical self-understanding. Marism
and Freudianism have due respect for analytc discourse, in contast to those
modem irrationalisms which can afford the luxury of not needing to know.
But for both creeds, the proof of emancipatory theory lies in the perform
ance; and in this ptocess theory and practice never form some neatly
symmetical whole. For if theory is a material interenton, it will alter the
very practice it takes as its object and so stand in need of transformaton
itself in order to b equal to te new situaton it has produced. Practce, in
other words, becomes the 'tuth' that interrogates theory; so that here, as in
the play of tansference and countertransference between analyst and
patent it is never easy to say who exactly i analysing whom. A 'successful'
theoretical act is one whic substntially engages with practice and thus
ceases to remain identcal with itself ceases to be 'pure theory'. Similarly, a
ideological practce is no longer identical with itself once theory has entered
it from the inside; but this is not to say that it now attains to a truth of which
it was preiously just ignorant. For theor can only successfully interene in
practice if it elicits what glimmerings of self-understanding the practice
alraiy has. If te analyst is 'pure' theoretcian, ten she will be incapable of
deciphering this paricular form of mystfed speech; and if the neurotic
patient were not already unconsciously in search of some self-under
standing. there would be no neurosis in the frst place. For such disturbances.
as we saw earlier, are ways of trying to encompass a real dilemma, and so
contain their own knd of truth.
If neurosis contains ths more 'positive' element, then so for Freud doe
an ideological illusion lie religion. He distinguishes in The Future of an
Illusion between 'delusions', by which he means psychotic states of mind in
outight contradicton wit reality. and 'illusions', which for all their
unreality express a genuine wish. A illusion, for example, may be false now
but might be realized in te furre; a middle-class woman may fantasize that
a prince wll arrive to marry her. and in the odd case may prove prophetc.
What characterizes such illusions in Freud's view is their 'forard-looking'
perspective, whch is to say that they are essentially modes of wish-fulfl
ment 'hus we call a belief an ilusion', he writes, 'when a wish-fulflment is
prominent factor in its motivation, and in doing so we disregard its
relatons to reality,just as the illusion itself sets no store by verifcaton' (213).
183
Ieolog
We need ony substtte the term 'ideology' for 'illusion' here to read the
statement as impeccably Athusserian: it is not a matter of verifng or
falsifing the representation in queston, but of grasping it a encoding some
underying desire. Suc illusion are indissolubly bound up wth realt
'Ideology', comment Slavoj Zk 'is not a dreamle ilusion tat we buid
to - escape an insupporble reality; in its basic dimension it is a fantasy
constructon whic seres as a support for our 'reality' itself an 'ilusion'
which structres our effectve, real social relatons and thereby masks some
insupportable, real, impossible kernel . . .14 A Athusser might put the point
in ideology, social realty is investd in the imaginary, interoven with fantasy
thoughout its entre fabric; and ths is very diferent from conceiving of it as
a cmerical 'superstucture' erected over a solidly real 'base'. It is also, we
may note, diferent from conceiving of it merely as a 'screen', whic
interpose itself between reality and ourselves. The reality and its appear
ance or fantasmal fonns are much more closely intermeshed t any such
imagery would imply. Real and imaginary are given in ideology together -
whic is why Zek can argue that 'the only way to break te power of our
ideological dream is to confront the Real of our desire which announces
itself there.' If 'disinvesting' ourselves of an ideological viewpoint is as
diffcult as it usually is, it i because it involves a painful 'decathectng' or
disinvestment of fantasy-objects, and thus a reorganaton of the psychcal
economy of the sel Ideology clgs to it various object wth the
purblind tenacity of the unconscious; and one important hold tat it has
over us is its capacity to yield enjoyment. Beyond the feld of ideological
signifcation, as ek point oue there is always a kind of non-signfng
'surplus' whch is enjoyment or jouisance; and ts enoyment i the last
'support' of ideologcal m
e
.ls
Illusion, then, is by no mean in Freud's view a purely negatve category.
Indeed it i a good deal less negatve than Marx's eary concepton of
ideology. If ideology is a conditon of reality sufused and supported by our
unconscious desires, as well as by our anxiety and aggression, then it
conceals a utopian kerel. Illusion adumbrates withn te preent some
more desirable stte of affairs in whch men and women would feel less
helpless, fearful and bereft of meaning. It is thus radically double-edged,
anodyne and aspiration together; and Frederic Jameson has argued tat ths
is tue of all artefcts in class society. Ideologies, cultural formatons and
works of art may well operate as strategic 'containments' of real contradic
tons; but they also gesture, if only by virte of thei colective form, to
I8
Frm Sho
p
enhauer t Sorel
possibilites beond
doppressive
condito
II6 O
n t argument even suc
'degrded' mode of gratcaton a pulp fcton encoe some fl impulse
to a more durble fulflment, and tus dimy prefgure te shape of the goo
society. Surprisigly, ten, Freud's concept of ilusion tur out to b at one
with the noton of ideology developed by te later Franrt scol Fr
Herbert Marcuse, te culture of class soety uat once a flse sublimaton of
social conict and - i ony i the very stuctural integrity of the work of a
- a utopian critque of the preent Walter Betas study of nineteenth
centry Psian society reminds us of Mchelet's slogan tht 'every epoc
dreams it successor', and fmds a buried promise of happiesand abun
dance in te very consumerst fantasies of the Parsian bourgeoisie. Ernst
Bloch, in his Pncile o Ho
p
e (19545), unearths glinnergs of utopia from
that most apparendy unpromising of all materials, advertsing slogan.
To examine the unconcious dimensions of ideology i at once hopeful
and cautionary. lfideology is interoven with fantasy, then t i one reason
for it fonndable power but such fantasie are never easily containable
wt the preent, and point in principle beyond it Utopia would be a
conditon i whic Freud's 'pleasure princple' and 'realty prnciple' would
have merged into one, so that social reality itelf b wholly fulfllin. Te
eter war bteen thee principles rules out for Freud any such reconcila
ton; but the unreality of utopia is therefore also the ipossibilty of any
totl identfcaton bteen our libidinal drives and a given system of poli
tcal pwer. What twarts utopia is te mof dystopia to: no ruling class
can be wholly victorous. Freud mlme to say directy of ideolo; but it is
very probable tht what he poits to as the fndamentl mechanisms of te
psyccal le are te stuctural device of ideology as well Projecton,
displacement, sublimaton, condensaton, repression, ideton, substtu
ton rtonton, disavowal: all of thee are at work in the tet of
ideology, as much as in da and fantsy; and this i one of the richest lega
cies Freud mbequeated to the critque ofideologcal consciousness.
The blief that human eistence is basically a matter of iteret, and thus
'ideological' to the core, gaters pace in the late neteent and early
tenteth centuries, a a cisis of capitalism m it r ratonity ito
questonP A the capitalist system lurches nerer to global imperalist
warfare, te faith in an absolute reason which typifed it more 'classical'
phse begis inexorably to colapse. Early tentet-enrry Europe u
awash with symbolism and primitvism, with a rerm to myth and a cult of
185
Idolog
unreason; it is shot tough wit strains of Wagner and Nietsche,
apocalypse and the dark gods. Indeed it is remarkable how much supposedly
avant garde tnking today simply reinvents the fn de siecle, with it
intmatons of some prmeval chaos lurkng beneath the ratonal fors of
soiety.
In his Teatie o General Sodolog{1916}, produced in te midst of the fr
world war, the Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto argues that the non
ratonal element in human behaviour greatly outweighs the ratonal. (o
doubt ts seemed an eminently ratonal cae at the tme, given a quick
glance at the newspapers.) In Pareto's view, tere' are certain relatively
invariable 'sentments' in human life, the expression of which he terms
'residues'; and these provide the primary determinants of our action.
Residues become encoded in tr in 'derivatons', meanng the sorts of non
loca or pseudologcal argument (appeals to custom, tditon. authort
and so on) which we use to justif our sentments. So derivation is really a
word for ideology, but a word which applies right across the board of our
discourses. Ideas are just specious ratonalizatons of unchanging human
motves; and politcs, whic for the right-wing Pareto is always funda
mentally elitst even in so-called democratic societie, is te art of
acquaintng oneself with the 'sentiments' and 'derivations' of the masses in
order to manipulate them in the right direction. At an historical moment
when mas revolutonary forces were strring, ths case had a certain politcal
ugency about it. Bourgeois ratonalit is being challenged by emergent
social powers, and must drop its mk of disinterestedness: it must ac
knowledge instead tat all ideas are a brand of sophistical rhetorc, and hope
tat its own rhetoric will outdo that ofit antagonist.
Ideas for Pareto may be false and unscientc, but stl fl a useful role
i sustaining social unit d in this he is at one with the politcal philo
sopher Georges Sorel. In hs Reections on Violence (1906), Sorel counters what
he sees as te drear positivism of the Second Intertonal wit hs own
peculiarly poetcized brand of Mm A a revolutonary syndicalist, Sorel
places the general ste at the cente of his politcal proramme; but what
practcal goals such a ste might aceve is for ma secondary matter. The
general ste is a mytl it exist a an image or enabling fcton whch will
unif the proletriat, organize their politcal consciousness and inspire them
to heroic acton. 'Use must be made', Sorel writes, 'of a body of images
whic b intuition alone, and before any considered analyses are made, is
capable of evoking as an undivided whole the mass of sentment whic
l0
From Schoenhaue to Sorel
coresponds to the diferent manifestations of the N undertken by
Socialism against modem society. Te Syndicalist solve ts problem
perfectly, by concentratng the whole of Socialism in the drma of the
general stike . . . .18 The general stike is a Romantc symbol, distlin in one
flash of intuition a whole complex reality; it is a pre-reflectve, pre
discurive image whch" allows for what Sorel, following m mentor Hen
Bergson, calls 'integral' rather tan analytc knowledge.
Sorel thus represents the point at which a Nietschean pragmatism
inrpts into the Marxist traditon. Political ideas are no longer to e assessed
as scientfcally correct or erroneous; the must be grasped instead as vital
organizing principles, unifing forces whch are 'tre' in so far as they
engender te 'noblest and deepest sentments' in te workng class and spur
them to revolutonary action. The are tus convenently proof against all
rational argument. For Sorel as for the Nietsche he admired, ideas are
practical, provsional ways of cohering our experience so that our powers
may best flourish. What matters is the elan of an image rther than the
exacttude of a teory; and to this extent Sorel 'aestheticizes' the process of
socialist revolution. The noton of the general strike, he remarks, produces
'an entirely epic state of mind'; and if such imagery is needed it is because
there is something 'obscure' and 'mysterious' about socialism which resist
all representation. 'No ratonal inducton', Sorel writes in typical ob
scurantst fashon, 'will ever dispel te mystery whch envelopes Socialism';19
and the same is true of the process of proletarian revoluton itself whch
'must be conceived as a catastrophe, te development of whch beggars
descripton'.2o Socialism, in short, is a kind of ' sublimity', defing all discur
sive analysis; and its content must thus be conveyed in the immediacy of a
mythcal image rather than by the circumlocutions of science. Muc
influenced by ths Sorelian irationalism, the German critc Walter
Benjamin wrote in his essay on surrealism of the need to 'expel moral
metaphor from politcs and to discover in politcal acton a sphere resered
one hundred percent for images'.21
The essentally practcal bent of Sorel's theories (he began life a an
engineer) ma superfcial radical appeal. But few tinkers more graphically
reveal te dangers of pragmatsm in radical thought. The intellectuals are
not concere about whether the ideas for whch te workers strggle and
perhaps die are true, or even whether they are practcally efcacious; they
are simply convenient ways of generatng the knds of consciousness whch
the itellectual deems desirable. Te irresponsibiity of such a stance is at
187
Ieolog
one wit Sorel's aestetcist glorifcation of revolutonary violence a a end
in itselE Hs thnng powerfully infuenced Atonio Gramsci, but helpe
breed a more sinister progeny too. The Romantic cult of will, action and
violence, te sub-Nietscean delight in the theatrical and heroic, the
apocalyptcism and poetc mystcism - all of these rendered Sorel's tought
more d palatable Co fascism. Indeed it is in fascism tat one current of
ideas we are tacing - the 'mythifcaton' of thought, its reduction to a mere
instument of deeper forces - fnds its fullest expression.
Te relatonshp between myt and ideology is not easy Co determne.22
Are myts the ideologies of pre-industrial societes, or ideologies the myt
of industrial ones? If there are clear parallels between te two, tere are also
signifcant points of difference. Both myth and ideology are worlds of
symbolic meanng with social functions and effects; but myth is arguably te
more capacious term, revolving a it does on the great 'metaphysical'
questions of birt, sexuality and death, of sacred tmes, places and origins.
Ideologie are generally more specifc, pragmatic fonns of discourse, which
may encompass such mghty issues but bring tem to bear more directly on
questons of power. Myths are usually more concered wit how the
aardvark got it lon nose than with how to spot a connunst. They are also
typically pre-historical or dehistoricizing, fong events in some eternal
present or vewing them as innitely repettive; ideologies, by contrast may
and often do dehistoricize, but the various nineteenth-century ideologie of
triumphal hstorical progress hardly ft tis bill. (One may argue, however,
that such ideologies of history are historical in their content but
immobilized in their form; certinly Claude Lvi-Stauss sees 'history' as
simply a moder myth.)
Myths may not legitimate political power a directly as ideologies, but in
te manner of Piere Bourdieu's doxa they can be seen as naturalizing and
universalizing a partcular social structure, rendering any alternatve to it
unthinkable. Tey can also be regarded in the style of a Li-Straus as
provding imaginary resolutons to real contradictons, and thus resemble
ideology in this way tO.23 Some ideological discourses may haress bodie
of myth to their purposes, as with Nazism or Th Htc Lnd one mght
tn also ofBertolt Brecht's uses of folk legend i hs literary work. Rater
than simply identfing myth and ideology, then, it seems safer to speak of
those aspects of ideologies which are mythical and those which are not A
myth is not just any old falsehood: we would not describe as a myth te
claim tat Everest can be scaled i forty mutes at a brisk -tot. To quali a
I88
From &lphur t Sorl
mytcal, the belief would have to be widely shared and reflect some sig
fcant psycolocal invesoent on te part of it adherent. Te ca tt
'science m the soluton to all of hUmanity's problems' would probably h
ths bil, and reveals. moreover, the element of idealition which most
mytologizing entails. Mythical fgures or events are tose imbued with a
aura of specialnes they are privieged. eemplary, larger-thn-le pheno
mena whic distl i peculiarly pure form some collectve meaning or
fantasy. We can thus speak of 'te myth of Jimi Hendrix', as we would not
spek of the myth of Jimmy Carter. Myth is thus a parcular regir of
ideology, which elevates certain meanings to numinous status; but it would
be a mistake to imagine that all ideological language involves this sort of
allure. Like ideology, myth need not involve flsity there u notg false
about the myth of Ji Hendrix, unles it implies a belief in h divinit.
Nor need myth be mystfcator, in the sense of breeding deceptve efect
in the service of a dominant power. Te myth of Enland a a sleeping gant
about to arise and trow of it shackles b sered the cause of poltcl
emancipaton in its time. Finally. we may note that wherea mys are
tyically narrtves. ideology does not invarably assume such a form.
1. however, raises an iportnt issue. Do politcl y oppositonl
movement live ineluctably i myt, or should we stve - a in tt dream
of Enightenment fom Kant to Freud - for a fture conditon in whic men
and women will face the world without such opiates. confdent in their
dignity a ratonal beings? Let us consider the example of the mythologes of
Irish natonsm. It is posible to make a number of severe critcisms of t
body of belief At u most exteme it is a form of esentalsm, tstng to
some pure esence of Irishnes (identcal with the Gelc and Catholic)
whch must be presered free of contaminaton from alen inuences. In this
view, Ulster Protetants would not fgure as tuly Irish at al. In its crudest
manifestatons, this essentalism merges into outright racism. Irish naton
alism tends to sponsor a cclical, homogenizing reading of htor, in which
there is an heroic contnuity of ant-imperialist stugle and in which almost
al of the il s of Ireland can be laid at Britin's dor. Abattes are the same
battle. all victorie and defeats efectvely identcal. It tves on an
iresponsible. mocstc, quasi-mystc cult of mdom and blood
sacrfce, for which failure sometmes appears more efcacous t success.
It is notoriously maculinisc, furnshe wit a pantheon of virile, seven-fot
u young heros alotted pseudo-relgous status. It tades in sexist stere
types about 'Mother Ireland', to whom these heros are eterl y wedded,
I8
Ideolog
and whom the w fert with teir lfe-ving blod. It is incurably
nostlgic and sentmental, fetshizes te cause of national unity regardless of
it socal content, and i markedly churlish and atvistc in it atttude to the
'modem'.
It is dear enough that no self-respectng liberal would be caught
associatng wit t barbarous creed. There are, however, to lines of
defence whic may be launced in its name, neither of whc need deny the
real crtcsms listed above. Te frst defence is tat this blanket condemna
ton fails to perceive te rational keel within te mytcal shelL It
overlooks the fact that ts mytology project in luridly exaggerted form a
number of uncomfortable home trths whc the Britsh would prefer to
ignore, and of whc their 'enightened' rejecton of suc dotrines is in part
a politca ratonton. Many of Ireland's problems have indeed had their
source in te colonal connecton with Brtain. For all the mythological
machimo, Irish men and women have indeed displayed remarkable courage
over the centures in teir strugle for natonal liberaton. 'Natonal unity'
may certinly be something of a fetsh, but are te British who hold tis
view therefore prepared to hand over the Home Countes to Dublin? There
is trut in the carge of masochism and cultc self-sacrifce; but it i also tre
tat md republicans have sometimes preferred to spill teir own blood
rather t that of others. Irish natonalst beliefs are certainly often
nostalgic and atavistic. contemptous of modernity; and looking at
moderty. who can blame tem? The myths of Irish natonalism, however
retogade and objectonable, are not pure illusions: tey encapsulate, in
however reductve, hyperbolic a fonn, some substantial historical facts. Tey
are not just benighted nonsense, as the decent-minded liberal might tend to
suspect.
But tere is a more fundamental line of defence to be run here. Fr is not
any such critque of the myths of an oppressed people bound to be launched
from an aridly intellectuaist viewpoint? Men and women engaged in such
confcts do not live by theory alone; socialists have not given their lives over
the generatons for te tenet that the ratio of fed to variable capitl gives
rise to a tendenta fal-f in the rate of proft. It i not in defence of the
doctrine of base and superstructure tat men and women are prepared to
embrace hardshp and persecuton in the course of politica stggle.
Oppressed groups tell themselves epic narratves of their history. celebrate
their solidarity in song and ritual, fashion collective symbols of their
common endeavour. Is all this to be scorfully dismissed as so much mental
I0
Fom Scho
p
enhauer to Sorel
befddlement? Yet if suc mythological consciousness on the
part of the
oppressed is valid and unavoidable, is it not in uneasy collusion with mystf
caton? When Walter Benjamn wrote that 'myth will persist as long as a
single begar remai',2+ it wa ts politcally negatve sense of mytology
tat he had in mind.
We seem, in short, to be faced with two equally unpalatable alternatives.
On the one hand, there is the Enlightenment hope that men and women
may come to outgrow mytology altogether; but this would seem to involve
a barren ratonalism. On te other hand, we may accept that the masses need
their myths, but that ths is to be sharply distnguished from the theoriing
of the intellecrals. In which case, as the work of a Sorel or Althusser may be
thought to attest, we have simply swapped an anaemic intellectualism for a
cynical opporrunism or elitsm. There is, however, a useful distnction
enforced by Frank Kermode in his Thc3cmco an Ending between 'myth' and
'fcton'. Ficton, in Kermode's view, is a symbolic constuct ironically aware
of its own fctonality, whereas myths have mistaken their symbolic worlds
for litera one and so come to naturale their own statuS.25 The dividing
line between the to is notably blurred, since fctions have a tendency to
degenerate into myths. Politcal demonstators who chant, 'The worker
united shall nevr be defeated' may actually believe ths, which is cause for
alarm. For it is not true that the workers united will never be defeated, and it
i irresponsible to suggest that it is. But it is unlikely that most people who
chant ths slogan regard it as some valid theoretical proposition. It is clearly a
piece of rhetoric, designed to foster solidarity and self-afrmaton, and to
'believe' in it is to believe in it as such It is perfectly possible to believe in it as
a piece of politcal rhetoric but not to believe in it a a theoretcal proposi
tion - a siranon of believing and not believing simultaneously which
somewhat complicates the drastcally simplistc phenomenology of belief
typical of some contemporary neo-pragmatist thought. To place one's
credence in te slogan a rhetorically valid is to perform a fctonal act,
whereas to take it literally is to fall victim to a myth. And it is in ths sense
that ratonalism and elitsm are not, after all, the ony political alternatves.
191
7
D I S C O U R SE A ND
ID E OLOGY
WE HVseen that the concept of ideology embraces, among other things,
the noton of reifcaton; but it can be argued that it is a reifcaton all of
itel Nobody mever clapped eyes on an ideological formaton, any more
than on te Freudian unconscious or a mode of producton. The term
'ideology' is just a convenent way of categorizing under a single heading a
whole lot of diferent things we do with signs. The phrase 'bourgeois
ideology', for example, is simply shorthand for an imense range of
discourses scattered in te and space. To call al of these languages 'bour
geois' is of course to imply that they have somethng in common; but that
common element need not be thought of as some invarable stucture of
categores. Ie is probably more usefl here to thin along the lines of Ludwig
Wittgenstein's doctrine of 'family resemblances' - of a network of over
lapping featres rather than some constant 'essence'.
Much traditonal talk of ideolog has been couced in terms of
'consciousness' and 'ideas' - terms which have their approprate uses, but
whch tend to nudge us unwittingly i the direction of idealism. Fr
'consciousness' too is a kind of reifcation, an abstracton fom our actual
forms of discurive prctce. It belongs to what we might call the linguistc
revolution of the twentet century that we have shifed from tnking of
words in terms of concept to thnkng of concepts in terms of words.
Instead of holding in empiricist vein cat words 'stnd for' concepts, we now
193
Ieolog
tend to see 'having a concept' as the capacity to use words in partcular ways.
A concept i tus more of a practce tan a state of mnd - though we have
seen that Louis Athusser risks bending the stck too far in this directon,
reducin
g
concept to social practices. But tere is a third way beteen
thinking of ideology as disembodied ideas on the one hand, and as nothing
but a matter of certain behaviour patters on the other. This is to regard
ideology as a discursive or semotc phenomenon. And ths at once
emphasies its materality (since signs are material entte), and preserves
the sense that it is essentally concered with meanings. Talk of sign and
discourses is inherently social and practcal, whereas terms like 'conscious
ness' are residues of an idealist tradition of thought.
It may help to ve ideology less as a partcular set of discourses, tan as a
partcular set of efects within discourses. Bourgeois ideology includes this
partcular discourse on property, that way of talking about the soul, this
teatse on jurisprudence and the kind of utterances one overhears in pubs
where the landlord wears a mlitary te. What is 'bourgeois' about this med
bunch of idioms is less the kind of languages they are than the efects they
produce: efects, for example, of 'closure', whereby certain forms of signi
fcation are silently excluded, and certain signifes 'fIed' in a commanding
positon. These efects are discuTive, not purely foonal, fearures oflanguage:
what i interreted as 'closure', for eample, w depend on the concrete
context of utternce, and is variable from one communicatve situation to
the net.
Te fr semiotc theory of ideology was developed by the Soviet
philosopher VN. Voloshinov in his Marism and th Philosophy o Languae
(1929) - a work in which the author boldly proclaims that 'without sn
tere is no ideolo'.1 In his ve, the doma of sign and the realm of
ideology are coextensive: consciousness can arise only in the material
embodiment of signifers, and since thee signifers are in themselves
material, they are not just 'refecton' of reality but an integral part of it.
'he logic of consciousness', Voloshinov writes, 'is the logic of ideological
communicaton, of the semotic interacton of a social group. If we deprive
concousness of it semiotic, ideological content it would have absolutely
nothig left.'2 The word is the 'ideological phenomenon par ecellence, and
conciousness itelf is just the interaliaton of words, a knd of 'inner
speech'. To put the point diferently, conciousness i less sometng 'wthn'
us than something around and between us, a network of signifers which
consttte us trough and through.
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Dicoure an Ideolog
lfideology cannot b divorced from the sign, then neither can the sign be
isolated from concrete forms of social intercourse. It is witn these alone
that the sign 'lives'; and these forms of intercourse must in turn be related to
te material basis of social life. The sign and tn social situaton are in
exticably fused together, and this sitaton determines from within the
form and stucture of an utterance. We have here, then, the outline of a
materialist theory of ideology which does not simply reduce it to a 'reflex' of
the economic 'base', but grants the materiality of the word, and the discur
sive contexts in which it is caught up, teir proper due.
If language and ideology are in one sense identical for Voloshinov, they
are nor in another. For contending ideological positions may articulate
themselves in the same natonal language, intersect witin the same
linguistic community; and this means that te sign becomes 'an arena of
class stuggle'. A partcular social sign is pulled ths way and that by
competng social interests, inscribed from witin with a multplicity of
ideological 'accents'; and it is in tis way that it sustains its dynamism and
vitlity. Voloshinov's work thus yields us a new defnition of ideology, as the
struggle of antagonstic social interests at the level of the sign.
Voloshinov is the father of what has since come to he called 'discourse
analysis', which atends to the play of social power withn language itself
Ideological power, as John B. Thompson puts it is not just a matter of
meaning, but of making a meaning stick) Voloshinov's theories are tken
forard in the work of the French Athusserian linguist Michel Pecheux,
notably in his Language, Semantic and Ieolo
g
(1975). Pecheux wishes to go
beyond the celebrated Saussurean distincton between langue (the abstract
system of language) and parole (particular utterances) wit the concepts of
'discursive process' and 'discursive formation'. A discursive formaton can be
seen as a set of rles which determine what can and must be' said from a
certin positon within social life; and expressions have meaning only by
virtue of the discursive formations within whic they occur, changing
signifcance as they are transported fom one to the other. A discursive
foraton thus consttutes a 'mtrix of meaning' or system of linguistc
relatons within which actal discursive 'processes are generated. Any
partcular discursive formaton wform part of a strUcrured totality of suc
phenomena, which Peceux calls 'interdiscourse'; and eac discursive
formation is embedded in rum in an ideological formaton, which contains
noniscursive practces as well as discursive one.
Every discursive process is thus inscribed in ideological relatons, and w
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Ideolog
b interally moulded by their pressure. Language itself is a 'relatvely
autonomous' system, shared by worker and bourgeois, man and woman,
idealt and materalist alke; but precisely because it forms the common
bais of all discursive formatons, it becomes the medium of ideological
confct A 'discursive semantcs' would then eamine how the element of a
specifc discursive formaton are linked to form discursive proesses with
reference to an ideological context. But the position of a discursive forma
ton witn a complex whole, which includes its ideological context, will
typically be concealed from the individual speaker; in an act of what
Pecheux calls 'forgettng'; and it i because of ts oblivion or represion tat
the speaker's meanings appear obvious and natural ' to m. Te speaker
'forgets' tat he or she is just the functon of a discursive and ideological
formaton, and thus comes to misrecognize herself a the author of her own
discourse. Rther a te Lcanian infant identfe itelf with its imaginary
reflection, so the speaking subject efects an identfcaton wit the
discursive formaton which domnates it. But Pecheux leaves open the
possibility of a 'dis-identfcaton' wit suc formatons, which is one condi
ton of politcal tansformaton.
The work ofVoloshinov and Pecheux has pioneered a varied, fertile stain
of discourse analysis.+ Muc of this work examines how the inscripton of
social power within language can be traced in lexical, syntactc and
gramatcal stuctures - so that, for example, the use of an abstact noun or
a switch of mood from actve to passive, may sere to obscure the concrete
agency of a social event in way convenent for ruling ideological interests.
Other studies involve analysis of the distibuton of speech opporunites
witn conversaton, or the ideological efects of oral narrative organiaton.
While sometmes solemny labourng the obvous, wheeling up the big guns
of linguistc analysis to despatch te inconiderable gnat of a dirty joke, ts
brand of investgation b opened up a new dimension in a theory of
ideology taditionally concered wit 'conciousness' rather d linguistic
performance, 'ideas' rather than soial interacton.
A quite diferent style of thought about language and ideology came to
characterize avant-garde European thought in te 1970s. For ths current of
inquiry, associated with the French semotc jourl Tl Que ideology is
essentally a matter of'fling' te otherwise inexhaustble process of signif
caton around certin dominant signfers, with which the indivdual subject
can then identf. Language itself is infnitely productve; but ths incessant
productvity c be artfcially arrested into 'closure' - into the sealed world
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Dicoure an Ieolo
of ideologcal stabilty, whc repels the disruptve, decented forces of
language i the name of an iry ut. Signs are ranked by a ce
covert violence into rigidly hierarccal order; a Rosand Coward and John
Ellis put it, 'ideologcal practce . . . works to m the subject in certin
positons in relaton to certai ftes of discours.'5 The proess of forgg
'representations' always involves tis arbitary closing of of te signif
chain, constictng the fee play of the sier to a spurously determinate
meaning whc can then be received by the subject as natral and inevitble.
Just a for Peceu the speaking subject 'forget' the discursive fonnaton
which sets hm in place, so for t mode of thougt ideological repreent
ton involves repressing the work of language, the mterial process of
signifing proucton whc underlie these coherent means and can
alway potentally subvert them.
is a sugestve conjuncture of linguistcs, Marism and psycho
analysis, involving an enriched materiasm whch ees the very const
tuton in language of te human subjt. It is not, however, without it
difculties. Politically speaking, ts is a latendy libertrian theory of the
subject, which tends to 'demone' the very act of semiotc closure and
uncritcally celebrate te euphoric releae of the force ofloc prouc
ton. It occasionally betrays an anarchc suspicion of meanin a such; it
flsely assumes that 'closure' is always counterproductve. But such closure is
a provisional efect of any semosis whtover, and may b poltcaly
enabling rather than constaining 'Reclaim the nghtl' ivolves a semotc
and (in one sense of the term) ideological closure, but it politca force lie
precisely in ts. Te left-semiotc hostty to suc provisionaly stbilied
signifers comes at res periously close to the lberal's banl suspicion of
'labels'. Whether such closure is poltcal y positve or netve depends on
the discursive and ideological contet and mmoe of analyis is generally
too eager to overlook discursive context in it left-academicist contempla
ton of language a 'text'. It is rarely, in other words. a for of actual
discoure analysis; istead, like it phological opponents. it tkes 'language
a such' a its object of enquiy, and thus fails to ecape a certain lef
formalism and abstacton. Jacques Derrida and his progeny are primariy
interested in the sliding of the Mallarean signifer. rather din what get
said during the tea-break in te Hilton kitchens. In the case of Tl Qu a
starry-eyed Wester view of the Maoist 'cltur revoluton' is naively
tansplated to the arena of language. so that poltcal revoluton bcome
implicitly equated with some ceaseless disrupton and overtur. The case
!7
Ieolog
betys an anarcistc suspicion of inttutonality as suc. and ignore the
extent to whic a certain provisional stability of identity is essental not only
for psychical well-being but for revolutonary politcal agency. It contai no
adequate theory of suc agency. since the subject would now seem no more
dte decented effect of te semiotc proess; and its valuable attenton
to te split, precarious, pluralistc nature of all identty slides at its worst into
an irreponible hy of te virte of scophrena. Politcal revoluton
becomes, in effect, equivalent to carnivalesque delrium; and uthis usefully
reinstates tose pleasurable, utopian, mind-shattering aspect of the process
whic a puritanical Marxism m to fequently suppressed, it leave tose
comrades drearily enamoured of 'closure' to do the committee work,
photocopy the leaflet and organe the fod supplies. What is enduringly
valuable about the case is it attempt to uncover te linguistc and psyc
analytc mecisms of ideological representaton - to expose ideology less
as some sttc 'set of ideas' than as a set of complex efects internal to
discourse. Ideology is one crucial way in whic the human subject strives to
'suture' contadictons which rive it in it very being, consttute it to it core.
A wit Atusser. it is what produces us as social subjects in the frst place,
not simply a conceptual staightacet into which we are subsequently
bound.
It is worth pausing to ask of this positon, however, whether ideology is
always a mater of ' fation'. What of te consumerist ideologies of advanced
capitlism, in whic the subject is encouraged to live provisionally. glide
contentedly fom sign to sign, revel in the rch plurality of its appetites
and savour itself as no more than a decented functon of them? It ts tue
that athis goes on witn a more fundamental 'closure', one determned by
the requirement of capital itself but it exposes the naivety of the belief tat
ideology always and everywhere involves fIed or 'transcendental' signifers,
imaginary unities, metaphysical grounds and teleo10gical goals. Post
structuralist thought often enough set up ideology in tis 'straw target'
style, ony to go on to confront it with the creatve ambiguites of'textuality'
or the sliding of the signifer but fve minutes' viewing of a video or cinema
advertsement should be enough t decontruct t rigid binary oppositon.
'Textuality', ambiguity, indeterminacy lie often enough on the side of
dominant ideological discourses temselves. The mistake springs in part
from project a paricular model of ideology - that of fascism and Stalnism
- onto the quite different discourses of liberal capitalism. There is a politcal
htory behind this eror like the members of te Franfurt School, certain
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Dicoure an Ieolog
prominent members of the so-called Yale school of critcism. whch has
sponsored suc notions, have or had politcal roots of one kind or anoter in
chat earlier European context.6 Ideology, for tem as for the end-of-ideology
teorists, then comes to signif Hder or Stalin, rather dTrmp Tower or
Davd Frost.
Finally, we may note chat tis theory of ideology, for all it vaunted
'materialism', betrays an incipient idealism in its heavily subject-cented
bias. In it instructive eforts to avoid economic reductonism, it passes over
i silence the whole classical Marxist case about the 'infrastructural' bases of
ideology, along with the centralit of political institutons. We have seen
earlier that we may speak of the insttutions of parliamentary democracy
themselves as, among oter thngs, an ideological apparatus. Te efects of
these instituton, to be sure, must 'pass through' the experience of the
subject if they are to be ideologically persuasive at all; but there is a certain
idealism implicit in takng one's startng-point from te human subject,
een if from a suitably 'materialized' version of it. This 'turn to the subject'
throughOUt the 1 970s represented at once an invaluable deepening and
enricing of classical politcal theory. and a retreat on the part of the
politcal left from those rater less 'subject-centred' social issues which, in a
protracted crisis of the internatonal capitalist system, appeared more than
ever intractable.
We have seen cat ideology is often felt to entail a 'naturalizaton' of
social reality; and tis is another area in which the semiotc contributon m
ben especially illuminatng. For the Roland Barthes of Mythologie ( 1957),
myth (or ideology) i what transforms history into Nature by lending
arbitary sign an apparendy obvious, unalterable set of connotatons. 'Myth
does not deny things, on the contrary, it functon is to talk about them;
simply it purifes them. it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and
eterl justfcation, it gives them a clarity which is not chat of an explana
ton but of a statement of fact.'7 The 'naturalization' tesis is here extended
to discourse as such, rather chan to the world of whic it speaks. The
'healthy' sign for Barthes is one whic unashamedly displays its own
gratuitousness, the fact chat there is no internal or self-evident bond
between itself and what it represents; and to this extent artistic modernism,
whch tpically broods upon the 'unmotivated' nature of its own sign
systems, emerges as politically ,progressive. The 'unhealthy' - mythological
or ideological - signifer is one which cunningly erases this radical lack of
motvation, suppresses the semiotc labour whic produced it, and so allows
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Ideolog
us to receive it as 'natral' and 'tnsparent', gaing through it in ocent
surface to che concept or signifed co whch it permits us magically
immediate access. Licerary realsm, for Barthes and m disciples, is ten
exemplary of d deceptve transparency - a curiously formalist trans
hiscorical judgement on everythng from Defoe co Doscoevsky, whic in the
'wlder' versions of ths richly suggestve case becomes an unitgated
disaster which oughc really never to have happened.
It is just ths spurious naturalzaton of language which the literary critc
Paul de Man sees as lyng at the root of all ideology. What de Man terms te
'phenomenalist' delusion, in the words of hs commentator Christopher
Norris, is te idea thac language 'can become somehow consubscantal wit
the world of natural objects and processes, and so tanscend the ontological
gulf beteen words (or concepts) and sensuous intuitions'.s Ideology is
language which forgets the essentally contngent, accidental relatons
between itself and the world, and comes instead to mistake itself as having
some kind of organic, inevitable bond with what it represents. Fr the
essentally tagic philosophy of a de Man, mind and world, language and
being, are eternally discrepant; and ideology is the gesture which seeks co
confate these quite separate orders, huntng noscalgically for a pure
presence of the thing within the word, and so imbuing meaning with all the
sensuous positvit of natural being. Ideology stves to bridge verbal
concepts and sensory intuitions; buc the force of tuly critcal (or
'deconstructive') thought is to demonstrate how the insidiously fgural,
rhecorical nature of discourse walways interene to break up ts felici
tous marriage. 'What we call ideology', de Man obseres in The Resitance to
Theo 'is precisely the confusion of linguistic wth ntral realt, of
reference with phenomenalism.") One mght fnd exemplary instace of
suc a confusion in the thought of the later Heidegger, for whom certain
words allow us a privleged access to 'Being'; in the contemporaneous
literary critcism of FK Leavis; and in che poety of Seamus Heaney. The
faw of chis theory, as in the case ofBarthes, lies in its unargued assumption
that al ideologcal discourse operaces by such naturalizaton - a contention
we have already seen reason c doubt. A ofcen in che critique of ideology,
one partcular paradigm of ideological consciousness is surepttously made
to do serice for the whole varied array of ideological forms and devices.
There are stles of ideological discourse oter than the 'organicist' - the
thought of Paul de Man, for example, whose gloomy insiscence thac mnd
and world can never harmoniously meec is among other things a coded
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Dicoure mIdeolog
refal of te 'utopianism' of emancipatory poltc.
It belongs to a post-stuctralist or postodemist perpectve to see
discourse a traced through by te play of power and deire, and thus to view
language a inerdicably rhtorcal We should be properly suspicious of
too hrd-and-ft a distcton between some scrpulously neutal, purely
informatve sort of speec act, and tose 'perforatve' piece of language
whic are clearly engaged in cursing, cajoling, seducig, peruadig and so
on. Telsomeone the tme of day is a much a 'performtve' a tellin
them to get lost, and no doubt involve some incrutble play of power and
deire for any alyst wit enough useless ingenuity to pursue the mater.
All discourse is aimed at the producton of certin efect in it recipients,
and is launced from some tendentous 'subject positon'; and to cis extent
we mght conclude with te Greek Sophists tat everytg we say is realy a
mater of rhetorical performance witn which quetons of tt or
cognton are strctly subordinate. If chis is so, ten lae is 'ideo
logcal', and te category ofideoloy, epanded to break-point once more
collapses. One might add chat te producton of cs efect upreciely part
of te ideological intenton of tose who claim chat 'everytng is rhetorcal'.
It is, however, a simple sleight-of-hand, or sheer intellectal disingen
uousness, to imagine chat all language is rhetorical to eacty the same
degree. Once again postmodernist 'pluralism' here stnds convicted of
violently homogenizing quite diferent sorts of speech act The asserton 'It's
fve o'clock' certainly involve interests of a kd, sprnging a it do fom a
partcular way of slcing up temporality, and belonging a it dos to some
intersubjectve context (tat of telling someone the tme) whc is never
innocent of authority. But it is merely pervere to imagne chat suc an
utterance, in most circumstances at least is as 'intereted' a sttng chat by
fve o'clock historcal materiasts must be washed in te blood of te
Lamb or face instant executon. Someon who writes a doctoral tesis on te
relatons beteen race and social class in South Afrca is by no means
disinterested; why bother, for one c, to write it in te frst place? But
such a piece of work norally difers from statement suc a 'e white
man will never surrender his heritage' in chat it is open to being disproved.
Indeed this is part of what we mean by a 'scientc' hypotesis. as opposed to
a groan of alar or a stream of invectv. The pronouncement 'e white
man will never surrender his heritage' a
pp
ear a though it could be
disproved, since it could be obtsely taken a a socological predicton; but to
take it t way would of course be wholly to miss it ideological force.
Z0I
Ieolog
Tere is no need to imagine that to enforce a working distincton between
these two discursive genres is to surrender to the myth of some 'scientfc
disinterestedness' - a fantasy which no interestng philosopher of science has
anyway entertained for the past half-century, The humanist's traditonal
patrician disdain for scentfc enquiry is not rendered partcularly more
plausible by beig dressed up in glamorously avant-garde guise,
If all language articulates specific interests, then it would appear that all
language is ideologicaL But a we have seen already, the classical concept of
ideology is by no means lited to 'interested discourse', or to the produc
ton of suasive efects. It refers more precisely to the processes whereby
interests of a certain kind become masked, ratonalized, naturalized,
universalied, legitmated in the name of certain forms of poltcal power
and much is to be politcally lost by dissolving thee vital discursive
strategies into some undiferentiated, amorphous category of 'interests', To
claim that allanguage is at some level rhetorical is thus not the same as to
claim tat all language is ideological. A John Plamenat points out in hs
work Ieolog someone who shouts 'Fire!' in a theatre is not engaging in
ideological discourse. A mode of discourse may encode certain interests, for
example, but may not be partcularly intent on direcdy promoting or legit
matng them; and the interests in queston may in any case have no crucally
relevant relaton to the sust of a whole social order. Aain, the
interests at stake may not be in the least 'false' or specious ones, whereas we
have seen that, for some theories of ideology at least, this would need to be
so for a discourse to b dubbed ideological. Those who today press the
sophstcal case that all language is rhetorical, like Stanley Fish in Doing What
Come NaturalIy are quite ready to acknowledge that te discourse in which
they fame this case is nothing but a case of special pleading too; but if a Fish
is genially prepared to admit tat his own teorizing is a bit of rhetoric, he is
notably more reluctant to concede that it is a piece of ideolog For to do this
would involve refectng on the politcal ends which such an argument
seres in me content of West em capitlst society; and Fish is not prepared to
widen hs theoretcal focus to encompass such embarrassing questions.
Indeed his response would no doubt have to be that he is hself so
thoroughly a product of that society - which is undoubtedly true - that he is
quite unable to refect on hs own social determinants - whic is un
doubtedly flse.
It is via te category of 'discourse' that a number of theorist over recent
202
Dicoure and Ieolo
g
years have made te steady tek from erstwhile revolutonary political
positons to left reformist ones. This phenomenon is generally known a
'post-Marxism'; and it is worth inquiring into the logic of this long march
from Saussure to social democracy.
In a number of works of political theory,
I O
te English sociologist Paul
Hrst and Barry Hndess frmly reject the kind of classical epistemology
whch assumes some match or 'correspondence' beteen our concepts and
the way te world is. Fr if 'the way the world is' uitself always conceptually
defned, then this age-old philosophical cae would appear to be viciously
circular. It is a rationalist fallacy, so Hindess and Hirst argue, to hold that
what enables us to know is the fact that the world takes the shape of a
concept - that it is somehow conveniently pre-structured to ft our cog
niton of it. A for a Paul de Man, there is no such congruence or internal
bnd beteen mind and realty, and so no privileged epistemological language
whch could allow us untoubled access to the real. Fr to determine that
ths language adequately measured the ft or non-ft between our concept
and the world, we would presumably need another language to guarantee
the adequacy of thi one, and so on in a potentally infnite regress of
'metalanguages'. Rater, objects should be considered not as exteral to a
realm of discourse which seeks to approximate them, but as wholly internal
to such discourses, constituted by them through and through.
Tis positon - though Hindess and Hirst do not say so, perhaps being
nerous or unaware of the fact - is a toroughly Nietscean one. There is
no given order in reality at all, which for Nietsche is just ineffable caos;
meanng is just whatever we arbitrarily construct by our acts of sense
m. The world does not spontaneously sort itelf out into kinds. causal
hierarces. discrete spheres, a a philosophical realist would imagine; on te
contary, it is w who do althis by talking about it. Our language does not
so much reect realit as sinifit, care it into conceptual shape. The answer,
ten, to what exactly is being cared into conceptual shape is impossible to
give: reality irself before we come to consttute it tough our discourses, is
just some inarticulable 7
It i hard to know quite how far this ant-realist case can be pressed.
Nobody believes that te world sorts itself into shape, independently of our
descriptons of it, in the sense that the literary superiority of Arthur Hugh
Clough to Afed Lord Tennyson is just a 'given' distncton inscribed in
reality before te began, grndly autonomous of anything we might come
to say about te issue. But it seems plausible to believe tat there is a given
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Ideolog
distnction beteen wine and wallabies, and that to be unclear on this point
mght be the occasion of some frustration on te part of someone loking
for a drin There may well be societes for which these tins signif
something entirely at odds with what they signif for us, or even certain
biarre cultural sytems which saw no occaion to mark te distncton at all.
But tis does not mean that they would stock their of-licences with
wallabie or encourage chldren to feed bottles of wine in their zo. It i
certinly tue tat we ourselves may not distnguish beteen certain sorts of
plant which for another cultre are uniquely diferent. But it would be
impossible for an anthropologist to stmble upon a society which registered
no distncton beteen water and sulphuric acid, since they would all b
long in their graves.
Simlarly, it is difcult to know how hard to press te Case that our
discourses do not refect real causal conectons in reality - an empiricist
doctrne which a good many post-Marxists have rater surrisingly
appropriated. It is certainly arguable that the Marxist claim that economc
actvit fnally determnes the shape of a society is just a causal relaton
which Marst, for their own politcal reasons, want to constuct, rther
da hierarchy already inscribed in te world waitng to be discovered. It i
somehat less persuasive to claim that te apparent causal relaton between
my lunging at you wit a scimtr and your head dropping instantly to the
ground is just one discursively constucted for partcular ends.
Hndes and Hirst's 'ant-epistemological' thesis is intended among oter
things to undermne the Marst doctrine that a soial foration is
composed of diferent 'levels', some of which eert more signifcant deter
mnacy than others. For them, this is merely another instance of the raton
alist ilusion, whch would view socety as somehow already interally
stctred along the lnes of the concepts by which we appropriate it in
thought. There is, ten, no such thing as a 'social totalit', and no such thing
as one sort of social actvity being in general or in princple more deter
miant or causally privileged d another. The relatons beteen the
poltcal, cultural, economc and the rest are one we fashion for specfc
poltical ends wit given historical context; the are in no sense relatons
which subsist independently of our discourse. Once again, it is not easy to
see just how far this case should be extended. Dos it mean, for instnce, that
we canot in prciple rule out the possibility that the Bolshevik revoluton
was tiggered by Bogdanov's asta or Radek's penchant for pork pie? If
there are no causal hierarchies in reality, why should this not b so? What is
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Dicour an Ieolog
it whch contain our discursive constuctons? It cannot b 'reality', for dt
is simply a product of them; in whic case it might appear tat we are free, in
some voluntarist fantasy, to weave any netork of relatons which strikes our
fancy. It is clear in any cae tat what began as an argument about
epistemology bnow shfted to an oppositon to revolutonary politcs; for
if the Marist doctrine of , last-instnce' economic determinacy is discarded,
then muc in traditonal revolutonary discourse w need to b radically
revised. In place of d 'global' brand of analysis, Hindes ad Hrst urge
instead te pragmatc calculaton of politcal efect witn some parcular
soial c0runcture, whc i a god deal more palatable to MNeil Kn oc
Ths theory, coincidentally enough, was sponsored just at te hstorical point
where the radical curent of the 1960s and early 1970s were beginng to
ebb under te infuence of an aggresive set of asault from te politcal
right. In ts sense it was a 'conjunctral' positon in more senses than it
proclaimed.
Te tesis that objects are entrely interal to te discourses whc
conttte tem raises te thory problem of how we could ever judge that a
discourse had constucted it objet validly. How can anyone, on t theory,
ever be wrong? If tere can be no meta-language to measure te 'fr
beteen my language and the object, what is to stop me fom constctng
the object in any way I want? Perhaps the inter rigour and consistency of
my argument is the ltmus tet here; but magic and Satansm, not to speak
of Tomistc theology, are perfectly capable of constuctng teir object in
interlly coherent ways. Moreover, tey may alway produce efects whic
somebody, from some vantage-point somewhere, may judge to be politically
benefc. But i met-language is a iluson, then tere would seem no
way of judging that any partcular poltcal perspctve wa mor benefcal
tan any other. The pragmatst move here, in other words, simply pushes te
queston back a step: i what valdates my social interpretatons are te
politcal ends they sere, how a I to validate tese ends? Or am I just
forced back here, agressively and dogmatcally, on asertng my interest
over yours, as Nietsce would have urged? Fr Hindes and Hrst, tere can
be no way of countering an objectonable politcal case by an appeal to the way
tngs are with socet, for te way tgs are i just the way you constuct
tem to be. You must appeal instead to your poltcal ends and iterest -
whic means that it u now tese, not the distncton between wine and
wallabie, whc are somehow sheerly 'given'. The canot be derived fom
social reality, since social realty derives fom the and they are terefore
Z0J
Ideolog
bund to remain as mysteriously unfatered and self-referental as te work
of art for a whole taditon of classical aestetcs.
Where interest derive from, in other words, is as opaque a matter for
post-Marxism as where babies come from is for the small infant. The
taditonal Marxist case has been tat political interest derive fom one's
loaton witin the social relatons of class-societ but tis for post
Marsm would seem to entail te unaussurean assumpton that our
poltcal discourses 'refect' or 'correspond' to something else. If our
language is not just some passive refection of reality, but actvely consttu
tve of it, then tis surely cannot b so. It cannot be that your place within a
mode of production furshes you with certain objectve interests which
your politcal and ideological discourses ten simply 'express'. There can be
no 'objectve' interest spontaneously 'given' by realit once again, interest
are what we conrct, and poltcs in ts sene has the edge over economics.
Tat social interets do not lie around the place lie slabs of concrete
waitng to be stumbled over may be ceerfully conceded. There is no reason
to suppose, as Hindess and Hirst rightly argue, that the mere occupancy of
some place witin society will automatically supply you with an appropriate
set of political beliefs and desires, as te fact tat by no means all women are
femnist would readily attest. Social interests are indeed in no sense
independent of anything we come to do or say; they are not some given
'signifed', whch has then merely to discover it appropriate signifer or
mode of ideological discoure to come into its own. But this is not the only
way of understanding the concept of 'objective interets'. Imagine an
objectve loaton witn te social formaton known a tird galley slave
fom the font on te starboard side. This location brings along with it
certain responsibilities, such as rowing non-stop for ffteen hours at a stetc
and sending up a feeble chant of praise to the Emperor on the hour. To say
that t social locaton comes readily inscribed wth a set of interests is just
to say that anyone who found himself occupying it would do well t get out
of it, and that this would be no mere whm or quirk on hs part. It is not
necessarily to claim that this thought would spontaneously occur o a galley
slave as soon as he had sat down, or to rule out the odd masochist who took a
grisly relish in the whole af a and tied to row faster than te others. The
view that the slave, ceters
p
arbu, would do well to escape is not one that
spring fom some God's-eye viewpoint beyond all social discourse; on the
contrary, it is more lely to sprng fom the vewpoint of the League of
Escaped Galley Slaves. There is no interest in queston here that nobody
Z0
Dicoure an Ideolog
could ever conceivably come to know about. When the galey slave engages
in a Spot of critcal self-refecton. such as mutering to hmself 'ts is one
hell of a job', then he mght reasonably b said to be artculatng in m
discourse an objective interest, in the sense that he means that it is one hell
of a job not just for him but for anyone whatsoever. There is no divine
guarantee tat the slave wilarve at the conclusion that there mght be
more agreeable ways of pasing hs tme, or that he will not view hs task a
just retribution for the crime of existng, or as a creative contributon to the
greater good of the empire. To say that he has an objective interest in
emancipatng hmself is just to say that if he doe feel this way, then he is
labouring under the inuence of false consciousness. It i to claim,
moreover, that in certain optmal conditions - conditons relatvely free of
such coercion and mystifcaton - te slave could be brought to recognize
tis fact. He would acknowledge that it was in fact in hs interests to escape
even before he came to realize ths, and ths is part of what he is now
realizing.
The galley slave might be instructed by te odd discourse theorist he
encountered at various ports of call that the interests he had now begun to
artculate were in no sense a mere passive refection of social reality, and he
would do well to take ts point seriously. He would no doubt appreciate te
force of it already, recalling the long years during which he held te vew
that being lashed to ribbons by te emperor's captain was an honour ill
befttng a worm such as himself and rememberng the painful inner
struggle which brought him to his current, more enlightened opinons. He
mght well be brought to understand that 'oppression' is a discursive affair,
in the sense that one conditon is identfable as oppressive only by contrast
wth some other less or non-oppressive state of afairs, and tat all ths is
cogniable only through discourse. Oppression. in short, is a normative
concept someone is being oppressed not simply if tey drag out a wretched
existence, but if certain creative capacities they could feasibly realize are
being actively thwarted by the unjust interests of others. And none of ths
can be determined oter than discursively; you could not decide that a situa
ton was oppresive simply by looking at a photograph of it. The galley slave.
however, would no doubt be churlishly unmpressed by te suggeston that
all ths meant that he was not 'really' oppressed at all. He would be unlikely
to greet such a judgement wit the light-hearted playfulness beloved of
some posrmoderst teorists. Instead, he would doubtless insist that whle
what was in question hre Was certainly an interpretation. and thus always in
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Ieolog
principle contovertble, what the interpretaton enforced was the fct tt
this situaton was oppressive.
Post-Marism is gven to denying tat there is any necessary relaton
beteen one's socio-conomic locaton and one's politco-ideological
interests. In the cae of our galley slave, this claim is clealy false. It u
certainly tue, as post-Marxism properly insists, that the slave's politico
ideological position is not just some 'refe' of his material conditons. But
his ideological views do indeed have an internal relaton to that conditon -
not in the sense that this conditon is the automatc caue of them, but in the
sense that it is the reason for them. Sittng for ffteen hours a day in the third
row fom te front is what hs ideological opinions are about What he says is
about what he does; and what he does is te reason for what he says. The
'real' here certainly exists prior to and independent of the slave's discourse, i
by the 'real' is meant that specifc set of practices which provide te reason
for what he says, and form the referent of it That these practces will be
interpretatively tansformed when the slave arrives at hs emancipatory
views is doubtess true; he Wbe led to theoretcally revse those conditons
in a quite diferent light. This is the kerel of mmof the post-Marxist case:
that 'signfers', or the means of politcal and ideological representaton. are
always actve in respect of what they signif. It is in ths sense that politco
ideological interests are not just the obedient, spontaneous expression of
'given' socio-economic conditons. What is represented is never some 'brute'
reality, but will be moulded by the practce of representaton itel Politcal
and ideological discourses thus produce their own signifeds, conceptalie
te situaton in specifc ways.
It is only a short step from here - a step whic Hindess and Hirst rashly
take - to imagining that the whole socio-economic situation in question is
simply defned by political and ideological interests, with no reality beyond
this. Semotcally speaking, Hindess and Hrst have merely inverted the
empiricist model: whereas in empiricist thought the signifer is thought to
follow spontaneously fom the signifed - in the sense that the world
instructs us, so to speak, in how to represent it - it is now a queston of the
signied following obediently from the signifer. The sitation is just
whatever politcal and ideologcal discourses defne it as bein. But this is to
confate economic and politcal interests just as drastcally a the most vulgar
Marxism. Fr the fact is that there are economic interests, suc as desiring
better pay or conditions of work, which may not yet have acieved political
artculaton. Ad such interests can be inflected in a whole number of
Z
Diour an Ideolo
confctg pol
tcal ways.
A wel a merely invert the relaton beteen
sied and signed, Hindess and Hit thus also efect a fatl semotc
cnfusion beteen sinied and rrent Fr te referent here is the whole
socio-economic situaton. te interest contained in whic are ten signed
in diferent ways by politcs and ideolog, but are not simply identcal with
tem.
Whether 'economics' gives rise to 'politcs', or Hrcvera a post-Marm
would hold, te relatonship i both cases is esentally causal. Lurkg
behnd te post-Marxist view is the Saussurean noton of the signer a
'producg' te signe. But t semiotc moel is in fact quite inadequate
for an understandin of the relaton beteen material situatons and
ideological discourse. Ideology neiter legilates such sitaton ito being,
nor is simply 'caused' by tem; rater, ideolog ofers a set of reaon for such
material conditon. Hndess and Ht i short, overlok the leitimatin
g
functons of ideolog, distacted a they are by a causal model which merely
stands vulgar Marxism on it head. Te relaton beteen an object and it
means of reprentton is ccially not te same a that beteen a mterial
practce and its ideological legidmaton or mystfcaton. Hindess and Hit
fail to spot d because of the undif erentated, all-inclusive nature of thei
concept of discourse. Discourse for them 'produce' real object; and
ideological lae i therefore just one way in which these objects get
consttted. But dsimply fals to ident te specfcity of such language,
whic is not just any way of consttutng realt, but one with te more
partcula functons of epl raton, conce, legitmat
and so on Two meanigs of discourse are falsely confated: tose which are
said to consttute our prctces, and those in which we talk about them.
Ideology, in shor goes t work on the 'real' situaton in tfonatve ways;
and it is ionc in one sene tat a pair of teorst so eager to stess te
actvity of te signer should overlok t. In another sense, it is not ironic
at all: for if our discourses are consttutve of our practces then there would
seem no enabling distance beteen te to in which ts tanformatve
labour could occur. And to speak of a tormatve labour here implie
that somethig presc t proes; some referent sometng worked upon,
which cannot be the case uthe signer simply conjures the 'real' sitaton
into being.
Wht is being implicity cl ened by Hndes and Hrst is nothin
short of te whole concept of repreentton. Fr the idea of representaton
would suget tat te signifed exist pror co its signer, and i ten
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Ieolog
obedienty refected by it and ts, once more, runs against te grain of
Saussurean semiotcs. But in rightly rejectng an em
p
iricit ideology of
representton, they mistakenly believe themselves to have disposed of the
noton as suc. Nobody is much enamoured these days of an idea of
representaton in which the signifed spontaneously puts forth its own
signifer in whch some organic bond is imagined to exist beteen the to,
so tat the signifed can be represented only i tis way. and in which the
signier in no sense alters the signifed, but remains a neutal, tansparent
medium of expression. Many post-Marxists accordingly abandon the whole
term 'representaton', whie around them the benighted masses continue to
speak of a photograph of a chpmunk as 'repreentng' a chipmunk. or a set
of interled crcles as 'representng' the Olympic game. There is no
reason to imagine tat the complex conventions involved in associatng an
image wth ureferent are adequately explained by the empicist version of
the process, and no need to trow up tryin to gve an account of the fonner
simply because the latter model has ben discredited. The tenn 'represent
ton bperfectly valid uses, as the populace, i not some post-Marxist, are
well aware; it is just a tickier cultural practice d the empiricists used to
tn
Te reason why Hindess and Hirst wish to jettson the whole notion of
representton is by no means ideologcally innocent. They wish to do so
because they want to deny te classical Marxist contenton that there exsts
some inter relaton beteen partcular soco-economic conditon, and
specifc knds of politcal or ideological positons. They therefore argue
either tat soco-economic interets are just the product of politcal and
ideological ones, or tat the two lie on quite diferent levels, with no neces
ulinkage beteen them. Semiotcs, once more, is a knd of politcs - since
i .ts is so, then many taditonal Marst theses about the socialist tans
fonaton of socety bein necessarily in the interest of the working class
would need to be scapped. Saussurean linguistcs is once more craftly
hesed to the cause of soal refonsm - a cause rendered more reput
able than it might otherise appear by its glamorous asocaton with
'discourse theor'.
Te constctve side of Hindess and Hirst's case is that there are a good
many politcal interest which are by no means necesarily ted to rl
sitatons, and that classical Marism moften enough lamentably ignored
d tt. Such non-lass politcal movement were gaterin force in the
1970s and the writngs of the post-Marsts are among other tings a
Z|0
Dicoure an Ieolog
creative theoretical response to ths fact. Even so, the move of severing all
necessary lin beteen socal sitaton and politcal interest, intended as a
generous opening to these fresh deelopments, in fact does them a dis
service. Consider, for example, the case of the women's movement. It is
certainly tue that there is no organic relaton between feminst politc and
social class, pace those Marxist reductonists who struggle vainly to funel
the foone into the later. But there is a good case for arguing that there is
indeed an internal relaton between being a woman (a socal sitaton) and
being a feminst (a poltcal positon). Ths is not, needless to say, t claim
that women will spontaneously become femnists; but it is to argue that
they ought to do so, and that an unmystifed understanding of their
oppressed social conditon would logically lead them in that direction. Just
te same is tue of the other non-class politcal currents astr in te 1970s: it
seem odd to assert, for example, that there is a purely contngent connec
tion beteen being part of an oppressed ethnc minority and becoming
active in ant-racist politcs. The relaton beteen the two is not 'necessary'
in the sense of naturl, automatic or ineluctable; but it is, in Saussure's terms,
a 'motivated' rater than purely arbitrary one even so.
To suggest that someone ought to adopt a partcular politcal position may
sound peculiarly patronizing, dictatorial and elitst. Wo am I to presume
tt I know what is in someone else's interests? Isn't this just the style in
whch ruling groups and classes have spoken for centuries? The plain fact is
tat I a in full possession of my own interests, and nobody can tell me
what to do. I am entrely tansparent to mysel have an utrely unmystfed
ve of my social conditons, and wl tolerate no kind of sugeston,
however comradely and sympathetic its tone, from anybody else. I do not
need tellng by some paternal elitst about what is in my 'objective' interests,
because as a mtter of fact I never behave in a way whic violates them. Even
though I eat telve pounds of sausages a day, smoke sity cigarettes before
noon and have just volunteered for a ffty percent wage cut, I resent the idea
tat I have anything to lear from anyone. Those who tell me tat I am
'mystfed', just because I spend my weekends gardening free of charge for
the local squire, are simply tring to put me down with their pretentous
jargon.
A a the relaton beteen social interests and ideologcal belefs go,
we saw in capter 2 tat they were in fact etremely variable. No simple,
sile homology is at stake here: ideological beliefs may signif material
iterest, disavow, ratonalize or dissemble them run counter to them. and
ZII
Ideolog
so on. For the monistc thnkng of a Hndess and Hirst. however. there can
ony ever be one Hxed, invariable relaton beteen them: no relaton
whatsoever. It is tue tat in their astonishngly repetitive texts the dis
ingenuous wQrd 'necessary' occasionally slides into this formulaton: in a
whole series of slippages, they glide from arguing that politcal and
ideological forms cannot be conceived of as the direct representaton of class
interest, to cla that there is no neces ar relaton beteen the two, to
suggestng that there is no connecton between them at all. 'There can be no
justHcaton'. they write. 'for a "reading" of politcs and ideology for the class
interests they are alleged to represent . . . politcal and ideological stggle
can ot be conceived a the stggles of economic classes.' 11 The teoretcal
strategem is plain enough: feminst. ethc or ecological politcs are
obvously not interl y related to clas interest, in whic case neither, are
socialism or Torsm.
Here. as in almost all of teir argument. Hindess and Hrt theatrcally
overeact to reductonistc forms of Marsm Their whole discourse is one
prolonged benm of the stc in te other directon, recklessly eaggeratg
what is otherwise a valuably correctve case. If the relatons beteen
ideological forms and social interests are not eterally fled and given, why
should one dogmatcally rule out the possibility that some tes of
ideologial discourse may be more closely ted to such interest dothers?
Wy limit one's pluralism in this self-denying way? What self-imposed.
pror restrictve practce i at work here? If it is te that tere i no
'motvated' relaton beteen beig, say, a pet-bourgeois intelectual and
opposing fascism, does it folow that there is no such relaton either beteen
puritan ideology and the early bourgeoisie. ant-imperialist beliefs and the
eperience of colonialism. or socialism and a lietme's unemployment? Are
suc relatons as abitrary as being an ant-Semite and an abstract
expressionist simultaneously? 'Politcal practce', tey coment. 'does not
recognise class interests and then represent them: it consttutes the interest
which it represent.' 12 If ts means that the 'signiHer' of poltcal practce i
actv,e in respect of the 'signifed' of social interest. modfing and
transforming them by its interentons, then it is hard to see why one would
want to deny such a cae. If it means - to retur to our eample of the glley
slave - tat m mno interests whatsoever relevant to his class positon
before politcal discourses moved in to artculate them, then it i clearly
false. The slave had indeed a whole cluster of interests associated with m
material situaton - interests in snatchi a little rest fom tme to te. not
212
Dioure an Ideolo
gatuitously antagonizing his superiors, sittng behnd a somewhat bulker
slave to win a lttle protecton from the sun, and so on It is just tee sort of
material interets which his politcal arid ideological discourse, when he
acquires it will go to work upon, elaboratng, cohering and tform
tem in varous ways; and in t sense material interest undoubtedly exst
prior to and independent of politco-ideolocal ones. The mater sitaton
is te rerent of te slave's poltcal discourse, not the sinied of it -
ifby d
we are supposed to beleve that it is wholly produed by it Hdes and Ht
fear tat to deny that the slave's unenviable conditon is the prouct of a
politcoideological lanuage is to imagne that it is then just a 'brte' fact
independent of discourse altogeter. But this apprehension is quite needles.
There is no non-discursive way in which the slave can decide not to
antagonize his superiors; his 'real' situaton is inseparably hound up wit
linguistc interpretton of one knd or anoter. It is just a mistake to rn
together the knds of interpretaton. inscribed in evertng we do, with
those specifc fonns of discourse which allow us to critcize. ratonalize,
suppress, explain or tansform our conditons of life.
We have se n that Hdes ad Hrst reet the idea that poltcal interest
represent pre-given social or eonomic one. Tey stl use te t
representaton; but the signifer now entrely consttute what it signifes.
J mean, in efect, tat they have come up not wit the teory of
representation but wit a phosophy of identty. Repreentation or
signifcaton depends on a diference beteen what pret and what is
presented: one reason why a photograph of a cpmunk represents a chp
munk is because it is not te actual anmal. If the photograph somehow
consttted the cipmunk - if in some Berkeleyan fanty, the creatre m
no existence untl it was snapped by the camer - it would not act as a
representaton of it. Much the same gos for Hndess and Ht's tlk of the
politcaVideological and the socaV eonomic. If the former actaly fashon
the later ten they are at one with them and tere c he no n of
representaton here at alL Te to become a indissoluble as a word and it
meaning. The semotc model which governs their tnking here, mislead
ingly, is tus the Saussurean one beteen signifer and siged, or word and
concept rater than tat beteen sign and referent
The upshot of d drastc swerve from economsm - whc would hold
that the poltcaVideologcal pasively and directly represent clas interet
is an overpolitciaton It is now politcs, not economcs, which reigns
213
Ideolog
supreme. And taken in any crassly literal sense, ts case is simply absurd.
Are we being aked to believe tat the reason some people vote Conervatve
is not because they are afid a Lbour goverent migt natonalize their
property, but tat their regard for their propert is creatd by the act of
votng Coneratve? Do a proletarian have an interet in securing beter
lvg conditon ony because she is already a soct? On ts argument, it
becomes impossible to say what politcs is actally about There is no 'raw
matera' on whc politcs and ideology go to work, since social interests are
the product of them. not what they take of from. Politcs and ideology thus
become purely self-consttuting, tautological practices. It is impossible to say
where tey derive from; they simply drop fom te skies, lke any other
tcendentl signfer.
If the working class has no interests derived from its socio-economic
conditon, ten tere is nothing in this class to reist it being politcally or
ideologically 'constructed' in various ways. All that resist my own politcal
constcton of te clas i someone else's. The working clas, or for that
matter any oter subordinate group, thus become clay in te hands of those
wishing to coopt it into some politcal stategy, tugged tis way and that
between soialises and fascists. If socialism is not necessarily in the workers'
interests, since the workers in fact have no interests outside those they are
'contucted' into, why on earth should they bother to become socialists? It
is not in their interets now to become so, since nothing in their concrete
conditons would intmate ths; tey wil become socialises ony when their
present identities have been transformed by te process of becomng
soialist. But how would tey ever come to embark on this process? Fr
tere is notng in their conditons now whic provides the slightest
motvaton for it The future politcal selves they might attain have no
relaton whatsoever to their present socio-conomic ones. Tere is merely a
blank disjuncton between them, as there is for those Humean philosophers
for whom what I was at the age of twenty has no relation at all to what I
shall be at the age of sixt.
Wy, in any case, should someone become a socialist, feminist or anr
racist i tese politcal interest are in no sense a response to the way society
is? (Fr society, let us recall, is in Hindess and Hirst's view no way at all, untl
it has come to be politcally constcted in a certain manner.) Of course,
once Hindess and Hirst begin to sell out why tey themselves are socialists
they wl fnd temelve ineluctably referring to someting very like 'the
way society is'; but strictly speaking ts noton is inadmissable to them.
214
Discoure an Ieolo
g
Radical politics thus becomes a kind of moral option, ungrounded in any
actal state of afairs; and these rgorous post-Althusserians accordingly
lapse into that humanistic heresy known to Marxsm as 'moralism'. Some
people, it appears, just are feminists or socialists, as others are UFO bufs;
and teir aim is to 'construct' other groups or classes in ways whch strate
gically further these interests, despite the fact tat tere is no 'given' reason
why tese groups or classes should rake the least interest in the project.
Alert to these and oter problems, the post-Marxist Eresto Ladau and
Chantal Moufe ofer us in their Hegemony and Socialist Strategl3 a suitably
modifed version of the Hindess and Hirst case. Laclau and Mouffe entrely
endorse Hindess and Hirst's doctrine that, in the words of the former pair,
there is 'no logical conecton whatsoever' (84) beteen dass position and
te politicalideological. This means, presumably, that it i wholly co
incidentl that all capitlists are not also revolutionary socialist. Ladau and
Moufe also obsere that 'hegemony supposes the constructon of the very
identty of [the] social agent [being hegemonizedJ' (58), a formulaton
whch leaves the question of what is being 'constructed' here hanging in te
air. Either ts statement means that there are no social agents at all untl the
process of politcal hegemony creates them, in whch case hegemony is a
circular, self-referental afair, whch like a work of literary fction secretly
fahons the reality it claims to be at work upon. Or it means that there are
exstng social agents, but the process of hegemony lends them an entirely
different identty all of its own - in whc case, as we have seen, it is hard to
know why these agent should be in the least motivated to leap the abyss
beteen their current and putatve selves.
Whereas Hindess and Hirst would abrupty sever all 'necessary' links
beteen soial conditons and politcal interest, Laclau and Moufe, whle
endorsing ths move, paint a more nuanced picture. There may be no logical
relation beteen these to realms; but that does not mean, ala Hindess and
Him, tat political and ideological forms simply brng socia-economic
interests into estence, for this, as Ladau and Mouffe shrewdly recogne, is
merely to lapse back into the very ideology of identit which post-Marxsm
seek to escape. If te various elements of social life - tose groups, so to
speak. awaiting te event of being hegemonized into a radical political
stategy - do not retain a certain contingency and identity of their own, then
te practce of hegemony simply means fusing them together into a new
kd of closed tort. In that case, the unifing principle of the social whole
is no longer 'the economy' but the hegemonizing force itelf which stands
215
Ideolog
in a quasi-transcendental relaton to the 'socal element' on which it goe to
work. Laclau and Moufe accordingly inert some cautous qualifcatons. A
we have seen, their positon is tat hegemony construct - presumably
'totly' - te very identty of te agent or elements i queston but
elsewhere in teir tet the hegemonic representaton 'moifes' (58) o
'contibuts to' (110) te social interests represented, whic would imply tat
they eert some weight and autonomy of their OWI Elsewhere, in a notble
equivocaton, they sugest that te identty of the element is 'at least
partaly modifed' (107) by their hegemonc artculaton -a phae i whc
everytn hangs on tat evasive little 'at least'. At another poit the authors
claim tat once social agent have been politcally hegemonied, their
identty ceases to be 'exclusively' (58) consttuted trough teir social
locatons.
Te dilenna is surely clear. It seems peculiarly arogant and appropriatve
to argue that, say, once a group of oppressed women are 'hegemonied' -
made part of some broader politcal stategy - their identtes as they exist
now wlb entrely submerged in dprocess. Wat they wlb then m
no relaton to what they are right now. If this is so, then the hegemonizing
process appears eery bit a imperious and all-tot as 'the economy'
was for 'vlgar' Marism. But i too muc weight is accorded to the kinds of
interests such women have now, in teir 'pre-hegemonized' conditon then
- so post-Marism fears - one is in danger of fallin back into an empircist
model of representaton, in whic politcaVideological discourses simply
'reflect' or passively 'represent' pre-consttuted social interest. Laclau and
Moufe steer nfily beteen ths partcular Scyla and Charybdis, but the
stin of the operaton betrays itself in the textual inconsistencies of teir
work. Striving for some middle ground, the authors seek neither a total
separaton beteen te to spheres in queston, nor a Hindess-and-Hirsta
confaton of them. They insist instead on a 'tension' beteen the to, in
whc the economic is and is not present in the politcal. and vce-versa But
their text contnues to hesitate symptomatcally beteen the 'exteme' view
tat the signifer fashions the signifed entrely - politcal hegemony
construct 'the very identty' of soial agent - and the more temperate cae
that the mean of politco-ideological representaton have an ef ct on the
soial interest they represent. In other words: the logic of Laclau and
Moufe's plitic - teir proper concer to safeguard the 'relatve autonomy'
of the specifc social interest of women, ethnic groups and so on - is not
entrely at one with the logic of a full-blooded post-structuralist thor
216
Diour and Ielog
which would recogne no 'gven' realty beyond the omptent sway of te
siger.
Hegemon
y
and Socialist Stratg is at least unequivocal in its CUr rejecton of
the whole concept of 'objectve interest', whic it can make no sense of at
But t is ony becuse it subscribe implicidy to a wholly untenable
version of te ide and ten quite undertndably gos on to reject it Fr
Ladau and Moufe, objectve interests mean something like interest
automatcally supplied to you by your place in the relatons of proucton
and the are of course quite right to dismiss tis noton out of hand as a
form of economc reductonism. But we have seen already tat there are
more interest ways of framing te concept. An objectve interest me,
among other tn, a course of acton which is in fact in my interets but
whic I currently do not recogne as suc If mnoton is unintelligible,
then it would seem to follow tat I a alwys in perfect and absolute posse-
ion of my own interet, whic is dearly nonsense. There is no need to fear
tt objectve interet somehow et outide social discourse altogeter
the phrase just allude to vad, discursivey famed interet which do' not
exist for me rght now. Once I have acquired such interet, however, I a
able to lok back on my previous conditon and recogne tat what I
blieve ad desire now is what I would have bleved and desred then u
only I had been in a position to do so. And being in a positon to do so means
bein free of te corcion and mystcaton which in fact prevented me at
the tme fom acknowledging what would be benefcial for me. Note tat
there is both contnuity and discontnuity, identt and diference, at work
here: what I am now is not what lwas then, but I cn see tat I should have
ben clamouring then for what I a stgglng for now, if ony I had
understod my circumstances better. Ts case tus rns counter bot to the
ve chat I am always self-identcal, always secretly in possesion of my own
best interests, and to te 'discontnuous' case that what I am now, as a
politcaly self-aware being. mnotng whatover to do wt what I was
when my best interest were unclear to me. In overreactng to te former
fntasy, post-Mm is at grave risk of lapsing into the latter, politcaly
fuitless positon.
What makes a politcal radical attempt to hegemone one social group
rather than another? The anwer, surely, can only b because she had
decided tat te 'given' sitaton of tis group, appropriately interpreted and
tanformed, is of relevance to te radical project If monopoly capitalist
have no interet independent of te way they are plitcally arculated.
ZIZ
Ideolog
then tere would seem no reason at al why the politcal left should not
epend enormous reources of energy in seeking to win them to its
programme. The fact that we do not is because we consider tat the given
soci interest of d dass make them a good deal less likely to become
soialists than, say, the unemployed. It is not in te gven interest of men to
bcome feminists (altough it is certainly in their long-term ones), and this
fact m clear political consequences: it means tat feminsts should not
spend too much of teir precious politcal tme trying to wn men over,
tough neiter should tey look te odd gift horse in the mouth. The
queston of what weigt one allots to 'given' interests - or whether tey exist
at al- is tus of vt relevance to practcal politcs. If there is no 'necessary'
relaton between women and feminism, or the working class and socialism.
ten te upshot would be a disastrously eclectic. opportunstic politics.
which simply drew into its project whatever socal groups seemed curently
most amenable to it. There would be no good reason why the stggle
against patarchy should not be spearheaded by men, or the fght against
capitalism led by students. Marxists have no objecton to stdent, having
occasionally ben in ths unenviable conditon themselves; but however
poltcally importnt te intelligentsia may sometmes be. it cannot provide
the major toops for te fght against capitalism. It cannot do so because it
happens not to be socially located witn the process of production in such a
way as to be feasibly capable of taking it over. It is in this sense that the
relaton between certain social locatons, and certain politcal forms. is a
'necessa' one - which is not, to repeat, to assert tht it is inevitable.
spontneous, guarnteed or God-iven. Such convenent travestes of the
cae can be left to te fantasies of post-Marism.
We have seen that a partcular brand of semiotc or discourse teory was
the vtal relay by whic a whole sector of the politcal left shfted its politcal
ground fom revolutionsm to reformsm. That this should have happened
just at a tme when te former strategy was confrontng genuine problems is
hardly a coincidence. Fr all of its undoubted insights. discourse theory
provided the ideolo
g
of this politcal reteat - a ideolog especially alluring
to left 'cultural' intelleccuals. Hndes and Hirst now espouse a politcs
whch could hardly be dubbed radical at all, while Ladau and Moufe. u
rather more explicitly ant-capitalise are almost wholly silent in He
gemony
and Scialis Strat
e
on the very concept of ideolog. In this rarefed theore
tcal mieu. al t of social clas or class-stuggle became rapidly branded
as 'vulgar' or reductonst overnght in panic-sticken reacton to an
218
Discoure and Ideolog
'economism' whic every intelligent soialist had in any case long left
behind. And ten, no sooner had tis positon become the fashionable
orthodoxy of sections of the political left, than a sector of the British
workng dass embarked upon the greatest, most protracted piece of
idustal mitncy i te annals of Britsh labour history . . .
With Ladau and Moufe, what Perr Anderson m called the 'infaton of
discourse' in post-structralist thought reaches its apogee. Heretically
deiatg from tei mentor Michel Foucault, Ladau and Mouffe deny all
validity to the distinction beteen 'discursive' and 'non-discursive' practices,
on the grounds that a practce is structured along the lines of a discourse.
The short reply to this is tat a practice may well be organized like a
discourse, but as a matter of fact it is a practice rather than a discourse. It is
needlessly obfuscating and homogenizing to subsume such things as
preacing a sermon and dislodging a pebble from one's left under the
same rubric. A way of underanding an object is simply projected into the
object itelf in a familiar idealist move. In notably academicist style, the
contemplatve analysis of a practce suddenly reappears as it very essence.
Why should we want to call a building a 'menu', just because in some
structuralist fashion we might examine it along those lines? The fact that
there is no necessit for ts move (for the Humean Ladau and Mouffe there
is no necessity for anything) betrays it as far from innocent. The category of
discourse is infated to te point where it imperialies the whole world,
eliding the distincton beteen thought and material reality. Te efect of
tis is to undercut te critique of ideology - for if ideas and material reality
are given indissolubly together, tere can be no queston of asking where
soial ideas actually hail from. The new 'tanscendental' hero is discourse
itself which is apparently prior to everythng else. It is surely a little
immodest of academcs, professionally concerned with discourse as the are,
to project teir own preoccupatons onto the whole world, in that ideology
known as (post-) stuctralism. It is as though a theatre critc, on being asked
the way, were to instuct you to exit stage-left at the end of the High Steet,
ccumvent the ft fat you reac and head for te backdrop of the hills.
The neo-Nietschean language of post-Marxism, for which there is little or
notg 'given' i realit, belongs to a period of politcal crisis - an era in
whic it could indeed appear that the traditional social interests of the
working class had evaporated overnight, leaving you with your hegemonic
fonns and precous little material content. Post-Marxist discourse theorists
219
Ideol
o
may place a ban on the queston of where ideas come from; but we can
certainly turn ts queston back on temselves. For the whole theory is itself
historically grounded in a partcular phase of advanced capitalism. and it is
tus living testmony in it very exstence to that 'necessary' relaton beteen
forms of conscousnes ad socal ret which it so vehemendy denies.
What is ofered a a univeral thesis about discourse, politcs and interests, as
so often wth ideologies, is alert to everytng but uow historical grounds
of possibility.
220
CON C L U S ION
I HVte in this bok to outline somethg of te history of te concept
of ideology, and to disentngle some of te conceptua conion atendent
upon it. But in doin SQ ! have also been concered to develop my own
pacular vew on te issue; and it is to a summary of tee that we c
fmlly tr
Te tenn ideology ma wde range of hstorica meanings, al te way
fom te unworkably broad sense of the mOdetermnaton of tougt to
the suspicously narrow idea of the deployment of fse ideas in the direct
interests of a ing class. Very ofen. it refer to te way i whc sign,
meanings and value help to reproduce a domiant socal power but it c
also denote any signifcnt conjunctre beteen discoure and politcal
interst. From a rdical stndpoint, the fonne me is pejortve, whe
the later u more neutl. My own view is tt bot of these sense of te
term have teir uses, but tat a good del of confsion marisen from te
filure to disentle them.
Te ratonalst ve of ideloges a consous, well-aculatd systms
of belef i clerly inadequate: it misses the afectve, unconous, myc
or symbolic dimenions of ideology; the way it contttes te subject's lived,
apparendy spontneus relatons to a power-stucte and come to provde
te invsible colour of daly, lfe itelf But ideology i in m sn
primarily perfontve, rhetorical, pseudopropositonal discourse, m u
ZZI
Iaeolog
not to say tt it lacks an importt propositonal content - or tat such
propositon as it advances, including morl and nonatve one, cannot b
asessed for teir trut or falsehood. Much of what ideologies say is tue, and
would be inefectual i it were not but ideologes also contain a good many
propositons whch are fagrantly false, and do so less because of some
ierent quality tan because of the distortions ito which tey are
commony forced i their attempts to rat and legitmate unjust, oppres
sive politcal system. The falsity in queston, a we have seen, may be
epistemc, functonal or generic, or some combinaton of te three.
Domnant ideologies, and occasionally oppositonal ones, often employ
such devices a unfcaton, spurious identcaton, naturalizaton, decep
ton, self-decepton unversalizaton and ratonaliaton. But tey do not do
so unversally indeed it is doubtul tat one can acribe to ideology any
invariable caracteristcs at all. We are dealing less wit some essence of
ideology tan wit an overlapping network of 'family resemblances'
beteen diferent styles of signicaton. We need, te, to look sceptcally
upon various essentalist cases about ideolog on the hitorcist case that it is
the coherent world-view of a 'class subject'; on te theory tat it is
spontneously secreted by te economic stuctres of soiety or on the
semiotc docte that it signifes 'discursive closure'. Al of tese perspec
tves cont a kerel of tt but taken in isolaton they show up as partal
and fawed. The 'sociological' view that ideolog provides the 'cement' of a
social formaton, or the 'cognitve map' which orientate its agents to action,
is to often depoltcizing in efect, voiding te concept of ideology of
conict and contadicton.
Ideology in its dominant forms is often seen a a mythcal or imaginar
resoluton of suc contradictons, but it would be unwise to overestimate it
success i achieving m goal. It is neither a set of difuse discourses nor a
semless whole; i it impulse is to identf and homogenie, it is neverthe
les scarred and disartculated by it relational character by te conflictng
interest among whic it must ceaselesly negotiate. It is not itself a some
historicist Marxism would seem to suggest, the founding prnciple of social
unty, but rater stves i te teeth of polt cal resistance to reconttute tat
unty at an imaginary level. A such, it can never be simple 'other
worldess' or idly disconnected thought on the contrary, it must fgure as
a orgzig social force whch actvely consttutes human subjects at the
roots of their lived experience and seeks to equip tem wth forms of value
and belef relevant to teir specifc social tsk and to te generl reproduc-
222
Concuion
ton of te social order. But tose subjects are always confictvely, pre
cariouly consttuted; and though ideology is 'subject-cented', it is not
reducble to te queston of subjectvity. Some of the most powerful
ideological effects are generted by ittutons such a parliamentry
democracy imperonal political processes rater than subjectve states of
being. The structure of commodity fetshism is likewise ireducible to te
psychology of te human subject. Neiter psychologistc teories of
ideology, nor accounts which view it as the well-nigh automatic efect of
objectve social stctures, are equal to te complexty of te noton. In a
parallel way, ideology i never te mere expressive efect of objectve social
interests; but neither are all ideologcal signifers 'free-foatng' in respect of
such interests. The relatons beteen ideological discourses and social
interests are complex, variable ones, in which it is sometmes appropriate to
spea of the ideological signifer as a bone of contenton beteen confctng
social forces, and at other tmes a matter of more interal relatons between
modes of signifcation and forms of social power. Ideology contributes to te
consttuton of social interests, rather than passively reflectng pre-given
positons; but it does not, for all tat, legislate such positons into existence
by its own discursive omnpotence.
Ideology is a matter of 'discourse' rather than of 'language' - of certain
concrete discursive efects, rather tan of signifcation a such. It represents
the points where power impacts upon certain utterance and inscribes itself
tacitly withn them. But it is not therefore to be equated wth just any form
of discursive partsanshp. 'interested' speech or rhetorical bias; rater, the
concept of ideology aims to disclose something of the relaton beteen an
utterance and its material conditons of possibility, when tose conditons of
possibility are viewed in te light of certain power-stggles cental to the
reproducton (or also, for some theories, contestaton) of a whole form of
social life. For some theorists of the ,otion, ideology is an inherenty
techncal, secular, ratonalist mode of social discourse, whch has spurned all
religious or metphysical efforts to legitmate a social order; but tis view
underplays its archaic, afectve and traditonalist dimensions, whch may
enter into signficant contradiction wth its more 'modernizing' thrust.
No rdical who takes a cool look at the tenacity and pervasiveness of
dominant ideologies could possibly feel sanguine about what would be
necessary to loosen their letl grip. But tere is one place above all where
suc form of consciousness may be tansformed almost literally overght
and tat is in actve politcal stuggle. This is not a Left piet but an
ZZJ
Ideolog
empirical face Wen men and women engaged i quite moest lo for
of politcal resistance fnd temselves brought by the in e momentm of
such confict ito diect confrontaton wm the power of the stte, it is
posible that teir politcal consciousness may be defnitvely, irreversibly
altered. If a teory of ideology h value at al, it is in helping to iluminate
te processes by whch such liberaton fom deat-dealng beliefs may b
prctcally efected.
ZZ
NOT E S
I NTRODUCTI ON
I. Se , fr exple, the delarton of the Ita pstoemist phiopher Gn
Vammo that te e of moety ad the end of idelo 2 identc mmenu
'Psooer Critcism: Pstoer Crtque', in Davd WomWrting t Future Lndon
199, p. 57.
1 WHAT S I DE OLOGY?
I. Fr a usfl summar of the various meanings of idelog, M A Naes et a.,
Deoac, Ie% g and Objetivt Oso 1956, pp. 143 I. Se also Norman Birbaum, "he
Siologcal Stdy of Ideolog 1940190', Curt Sciolo vL 9, 1960. for a survey of
therie ofidelogy fm M t the moer day ad an exellent bibloraphy.
2. Eme Durkeim, Thf Rule oSoioloiC1 Meti London 1982. p. 86.
3. Fr the 'end of idelogy' idelogst. M Daniel Bel, 1End 4Idelog Glenco. Il .
1960; Rbr E. Une. PlitiC/ Ideolog Ne York 1962. ad Raymond An Th Oium o t
Intellctul Lndon 1957.
4. Ewa Shils, "The concept a fncton of idelog', Inttionl Ercfopeia o t
Sial Siece vol. 7, 198.
5. Avin Guldner. T Dilctic 4Idoloand1nolog London 1 976, p. 4.
6. John B. Thompson, Studie in the Thor of Idlo Cmbrdge 1984, p. 4. Fr another
gneral stdy of idelog se D.]. Manning. e . T Fr of Idolo London 1980.
7. Kenneth Minoue, Ale Pw Lndon 1985, p. 4.
8. M Slger, Ielo and Polti Lndon 1 976, p. 11. Se a h Th Mr Cmmt4
Idlg, London 1 977.
225
Ieolog
9. Se Micel Fucult, Dipline and Pnih: The Birh o the Pon, New York 1977.
10. Se Emile Benevste, Prbles in General Linguitic Miami 1971.
1 1. Rymond Wilias Kr, London 1976, pp. 143-4.
12. Rchard Rort, Cnlingn'' Irny and Solidarit Cambrdge 1989.
13. Aex Calincos Marim and Philooph, Oord 1985, p. 134.
14. Gr Terbr, ThIeolog ofPowe and the Pow ofIeola, London 1980, p. 5.
IS. M Sliger, Ieolog and Plilic pasim.
16. Rsnd Cward and John Ellis, Lnguage dnd Matialim London 1 977, p. 90.
17. Bjer T Rambrg, Dnald Dvdon's Philosophy o Lnguage, Oxford 1 989, p. 47.
18. 'Blef Bia and Idelogy', in M. Hollis and S. Luke, eds, Ralionalit dnd Relativsm,
Oord 1982.
1 9. The later claim wa one of the few part of my argument to b srouly conrted
when I delivrd a veion of this chapter a a lectr at Brgham Young Univerity, ut.
20. Se Sabina Lovbnd, Reaon and Imagination in Ethic Oxford 1982, and Davd O.
Brink, Moml Realim and th Fundation oEthia Cabrdge 1 989.
21. Lovbnd, Reaon and Imgination p. 36.
22. IA Rcs Pncipl o Litar CLondon 1 924, c 3S.
23. SeTery Eagleron, ' Ideolog ofthe Aeheti" Oxrd 1 990, pp. 93-96.
24. Luis Althus r, Fr Mar Lndon 1969, p. 234.
25. Se JL Austn, How T D Things With Wor, London 1 962.
26. Pul Hirt, Lw and Ideolog London 1 979, p. 38.
27. Pul de Man, Allgorie o Reading New Haven 1 979, ch. 1.
28. Deny Trer, Marm and Chrianit. Oxrd 1983, pp. 22-3.
29. Ibid., p. 26.
30. Raymond GusT Idea o a Crticdi Theor Cambrdge 1981, ch. 1.
31. Ibi., p. 21.
32. Tony Skllen, 'Disoure Fver', in R Edgley and p Osbre, eds, Radical Philosophy
Rader, London 1 985; p. 332.
33. Pter Sloterdik, Critique oCy;cal Reaon, London 1988, c. I.
2 I DE OL OGI CAL STRATE G I ES
1. M Pster, ed.,Jean Baudrllard: Slectd Writings Cambrdge 1 988, p. 172.
2. S1avoj :i k ' Sublime Object oIeokgLondon, 1989, p. 28.
3. Rymond Gus, T Iea ofa Crtical 'or c. I.
4. Se Pere Mery, A Theor o Litr Pdution London 1 978.
5. Se Herbrt Marcus, OnDimenionl Man Bsrn 1 964, ad Teoor Adoro,
Netiv Dialctic London 1 973 ad Minim Moralia London 1974.
6. Raymond Willims, Marm dnd Littur, Oford 1 977, p. 132.
7. V.N. Volohinov, Mar and th Philoophy o Languag, New York and London 1973,
p. 93.
8. Wil Marm and Litratun p. 1 25.
9. Voloshov, Marm and th Philsoh o Langug p. 92.
10. WilMar and Litetur, p. 125.
11. J. Lplance ad J-B. Pnwis, Th Langug oPlAndli London 1980, p. 375.
12. Se , for exmpl, Jon Elster, Sour Grap Suie in th Subwion ofRitionalit
Cbridg 1983, ad Herbrt Fnet, SlDecetion Adantc Hghlands NJ . 1969.
13. Ter, Marm and Chrini pp. 119-21.
226
Not
14. l ow some of te pineto|onElstr, 'Belief, Bias and ideolog'. in M. Hollis and S.
Lukes, eds. Rationlit and Relativ Oxford 1982.
15. Karl Mar ad Fderc Engels. T Geran Idolog e. C.
Athur, London 1974.
pp. 65-6.
16. SeJorge Lr n, The Cncet i Ideolog. London 1979. p. 62.
17. Louis Althusser. Lin and Philosophy London 1971. p. 164.
18. Se Noran Gras. Mar and Human Natur, Lcndon 198.
19. Althus r, unin ald Philosophy p. 175.
3 FROM THE ENL I GHT E NME NT TO THE SE C OND
I NTE R NAT I ONA L
I. SeGeorge Lichtheim, 'Te Concept of Ideology'. in The Concet i Ieologand other
Es y New York 1967. Sealso Hans Barth. Truth and Ideolog Berlley and Los Angeles 1976,
c 1.
2. Fr a usefl account of this style of tought. see Bail Willey, The Eighteenth Cntur
Bckgrund. London 1940.
3. Fr a superbly erdite account ofTracy's life, see Emmet Kennedy, A Philosopher in th
Ag iReolution: Dett de Tmc and the Orgin i'deolog: Philadelphia 1978.
4. Quote by Kennedy, A Philosopherin the Age i Relution, p. 189.
5. Quote in Naeset a . Democrac, Ieolog and Objectivt, p. 151.
6. Fr an account of Mar and ideology, see H. Lefebv, T SociologofMar, London
1963, ch. 3.
7. Mar ad Engels. The Geran Ideolog, p. 47. Fr some interesting comment on this
text, see Louis Dupre. Mar' Social Critiqu i Culture, New Haven and London 1983.
8. Ibid . p. 47 (my itc).
9. Ibid . p. 52.
10. Williams. Maris and Litm/ur p. 60.
11. Se WJ.T Mitchell, I(ololog. Chicago and London 1 986, pp. 168 f
12. Ibid., p. t 7 3.
13. M ad Egels Th Gern Ieolo p.
64.
14. Iid . p. M.
15. Ibid., p. 53.
16. M ad Engels. Selct Work voL 1, London 1 962. p. 362.
17. K M Cpit vol. I. New York 1967. p. 71. Fr co excellent analyses of Mar's
later vion of idelogy, se Norman Gra, 'Marxism and the Crtque of Plitcal Eonomy'.
in R Blackbur e . Ieolo in th Socal Sciences, London 1972. and G.A. Cohen, Krl Mar'
ThoriHiwr: A Deece. Oxfr 1978, ch. 5. Sealso the comment by FJakubwsk.
Ideolo ald Supertrtur in Hiorical Materalim, London 1976.
18. CallincOs Marm and Philosophy. p. 131.
i9.Etene Balbar. 'he Vaclaton of Idelog'. in C. Nelson and L Grosberg. eds,
Marism and the Intretation i Culture. Urbana and Chicago 1988, p. 168.
20. Lr ThCncet o Ieolog p. 180.
21. Gm 'Ms and te Critque of Politcal Eonomy', p. 286.
22. John Mephalll, 'he Theor of Idelogy in Cpital'. Radical Philosophy no. 2, summer
1972.
23. Gorg Lukacs, Hitr and ClasConioues. London 1971. pp. 834.
24. |oMcCamey, T Real World i Ideolog Brghton 1980. p. 95.
ZZ/
Ideolog
25. f. LoghHnIt-Lhrtny. Mosow 1971, p. 135.
26. V.1. Lenin, WhlDLr/,London 1958, p. 23.
4 FROM LUKAC5TO GRAMS CI
1 . Lukacs, IuIn4LkCmtomu p. 204.
2. 04.,p. 204.
3. 'Historicism' in it Marist sen i elegatly summarizd by Pr y Andern a an
idelog in whch 'socet bcome a citcular "epressivw totty, histor a homogeneus
fow of linear tme. phosphy a slf-onsiousnes of the historical proces, clas strgle a
combat of collectve "subjet", capitalism univr es ental y defned by alienaton
communism a stat of te humanism beyond alienation' [Cm4ocltonton Hkmm4nm
Lndon 1976. p. 70).
4. Bhkhu Paek m1hrnN r&Lndon 1982, pp. 171-2.
5. Like most analoge. ths one limp: the Heelian Idea i raly it ow cton
whera the prletrat, far fm bing slf-genertng, is fr Marsm an efect of the pO
of cpita.
6. Lszk KHuwL, m4n Lum0 Nm4=bm vol. 3, Oxfor, 1978, p. 270 (my
prentheis).
7. Luk. Histor and Clas Consousnes, p. 83. Fr usl dission of Lukas's
tought MA Arato and P. Breine. 1hrYanIumoLndon 1979. c 8, ad Michael Uwy,
LnIumo~romcmclmmlcbhrmm.London 1979, par 4.
8. Lukac. ImnmLUCm0m ,p. 52.
9. Garet Stedma Jone, 'he Marsm of the early Lukcs: An Evaluton', wL
rwm\no. 70, NovemberIecembr 1971.
10. Nitos Poulant tlt4wo4n4otcL4Lndon 1973, part 3, ch. 2. lt should
b pinted out tat Lukacs do in fct hold that there are hetrogeneus 'levels' of ideolo.
11. Se Eresto Lclau, Ioon4ronm4nul1hr6n,London 1977. c 3.
12. Lulcs, IUn4mLkCmmu p. 76.
13. 04..p. 70.
14. SeLucio Collett m4Ou= n4Ir(London 1973, c 10.
15. Lukacs, Imn4n4L=Cmrtmp. 54.
16. bt4..p. 50.
17. bt4.,p. 69.
18. Kr Mannheim, 4r6k( m L9t, Lndon 1954. p. 87. Ther are sugstv
crtques of Mannheim in Larain. ' CnclN m/6W ad in Nigel Abrcombie. Lk ,
Inclnn4ncwk4(. Oxford 1980. Seals B. Prek's es ay in R Benewick. ed., nmr4w
4mtHtnItuLndon 1973.
19. Pr Anderon, 'e Antnomie of Antonio Ga', Wm!j rw. no, 100,
Novembr 19761auar 1977.
20. VJ. Lnin, C/rrk Hrkvol. 27, Mosw 1965, p. 464. Seals Caren Claudin
Urndo. !nn4rdlmLlra/w Iton.Hasoks, Susx, 1977.
21. W smanm4n4Ltkr4IN,p. 112. Fr a historca srdy of pltcal hegemony i
eighteenth- and ninetenth-centur England, M Fancis Hear. Lmn4ltn.!lm4l6n,4m
cbmr, Wetrt, Conn. 1978.
22. Se my 1hrMmcN INHclhrItc.Ofor 1990. c 1 ad 2.
23. Antonio Grmsi, rcIom(=lmonWk06k Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith,
e. London 1971. p. 268.
228
Not
24. Id. p. 376.
25. 4.p. 370.
26. 4p. 348.
27. Ibi., p. 365.
28. SeOa t tOpcAbrtcM Cis 'U':LbWOaOmObHkOn',i An e
bbOwtuckn.e. HoomrmkCmmLondOa 1982.
29. QuOte aCr.'Um'sLbwaoOn1.p. 226.
30. GFNtbok p. 424.
31. d., p. 328.
32. SeMcmHuDno nrdPwrdmdCk &LndOn 1973, I l l, 2. HOwfr
Huaam cwb tb c dimdy at Um, mmcr t at Lu s mcwmt
bigucm
33. >c Lau Mcuhc. 'Hemcny a doOma Um'.i Ct Mcuhc, m
Crdmrdmmdnl1n.LadOn 1979, p. 192.
34. Gram, Pn Notbok p. 453.
35. Ibi p. 18.
5 LM LLKMLLOLLL L L
1. SeFrc ]ammn. TWlrdUmmwLadOa 1981, pp. 1 1 +15.
2. SeTcrAcmo,HmIk1mnLadOa 1984.
3. Acmc,Negtil Diaktir p. 161.
4. d., p. 150.
5. Ib4.,p. 6.
6. S]utwa Hbr 1m1nN Cmmunitil HrI 2 vl, bstcn 1984.
7. QuOt bybOm Moy, TCrlm qNjmMdNLadOa 1978,
p. 273.
8. QuOte aPt D cdHdN:HvwmmUdnh, LadOa 198, p. 51.
9. Mdzmy,1mLrIk1mn(jmMNp. 56.
10. Quotcdibid . p. 201.
11. ]utwaHab.KnlgdmMvmnmbLmbndw. 1987, p. 217. Hbr'
u cuntclHudm~amyve ]mtycnocm3O vcymoOazsoc.
12. Ibid. p. 227.
13. KM 1mneN 5qm HwvU, MOvwn. p. 147.
14. SeLocmcBaba d mcm Me, 'O Ltrr dcOOmca Hm'. a
RbrM YOuay, m. UhwIN1mLOadOa. 1981.
IS. uwBKczt1NIuo (1NnLlOtd. 1981, p. 178.
16. mrcxccntu cunoOAmmr's mOuybt. seAe L cO AI0 1mdnm
LOadOa 1976; l Bntn, T m dmFi (lmIrmdLnOn 1984; d Grr
L OUAIkw1LkrN 1nLadOa 1987.
17. bc y 'dcO d doOmm bNtc Apparat' a b tOmd i Luu
Atbuwr,LndmPkmLndOa 1971.
18. mracOmoaym cuntOlWcmmMm seHAadOa. Cmttmn
WemdmLadOa 1976.
19. SeLOusAtbuwr,EnCrlrm.LOadOa 1 976, p. 1 1 9.
20. SeBar Bam, KnoUIJgand IwCmmkNnmbLndOa 1977. p. 41.
21. Se Ew bOma. 'e W OlcOw O A Oo Lmn'. a 1
PnN 1mnLoadOc 1 978.
ZZ
Ideolog
22. Altussr, Psil SlCritii p. 121.
23. Lea's es y C b found in h &1 Lndon 1977. Se a Frc Jaen
'Iyad Symblic in La', Hl Fnh Si 55/56, 1977.
24. Louis Atusr, Fr Mar London 1 969, pp. 233-.
25. SeCl Mb, 'O Du', Ec IWm an Scit vL 8, no. 3, Augut 1979.
26. Althusr, Lin an Philosohy p. 1 74.
27. Pt LcLic ofDntratot London 1987, pp. 7879.
28. SeAndern, Cnsideration Ol Wet Mar Ch. 4.
29. Lnin and Philosphy, p. 181.
30. A diepy noted b Jacque Rere in his 'O te Ther of Idelo -
Athusr's Plitcs', i R Egley ad P. Osbre, e, Rical Philoophy Reader, London 1985.
31. Se my 'Ba ad Suptuctr in Rymond Wil', in Ter Eleron, ed.,
Ryon Willim: Critial Pctil Cabrdge 1 989.
32. Athus r, Lnin and Philooh p. 169 (my itcs
33. Athus r, Fr Mar p. 235.
34. Quotd by Jonta R, Philosohical Tle, London 1985, p. 59.
35. Cliford Ge'Idelo a a Cultural System', in The Intrttion oCulturs New
York 1 978. St Hlals adopt this verion of ideology in h 'The Ptoblem of Ideolog', in
Bt y MmoMar: A Hundrd 1a OLondon 1983.
36. SeAlthus r's unpublished es y of 1 969, 'heore, Pratque Theorique et Fration
Teorique, Ideologe et Lutte Ideologique', quoted by Elliot, Althuspp. 1 72-.
37. Raymond Boudon, Te Anlyi of Ieolog Oxford 1 989. pr 1 .
38. Dc Howard, Th Pliti gCritique London 1 989. p. 178.
39. Avin Gouldner, Te Dialcti oIeolo and TchnologLondon 1976, p. 30.
40. SeThompsn, Studies in the Teor OfIeolog. p. 34.
41. Jirgen Hab Twrds A Rational Sciet Bston 1970, p. 99 (my parenthees).
42. Piere Burdieu, Outlin ofa Theor o Ptie Cambridge 1977. p. 192.
6 FROM S C HOPE NHAUER TO S OREL
1 . AbO. Hirshman, T Psion and the Inrl Prnceton New Jery 1 977.
2. Ibi . p. 43.
3. Fr a fle account, se Th Ueolog o t Aehtic, Oxord 1 990. c. 3.
4. Fredrch Nietzhe, Te Will to Pow New York 1 968, p. 269.
5. Fredrch Niethe, The 7iligJ o th Iol London 1927, p. 34.
6. Fredrich Nietche, Bond G and Evl i Wate Kun, ed., Bsi, Wrtings oj
Nietche New York 1 968, p. 393.
7. Stanley Fsh. Doing What Cme Naturlly Oford 1 989.
8. Richard Ror. Cnequce oPagmati Minneaplis 1 982. p. 166.
9. HhDoing Wht Cme Naturall p. 2
5.
i0. SeJonat La. Arttl and th Deir to Underand Cambridge 1 988. c. 5.
It. SeChristopher Noris, Th Cltt oFcultie London 1985.
i2. Sigmund Freud. Th Futur o an Illuion. in Siund Frd: Civlition, Sciet an
Reliiot Harmondswrh 1 985. p. 225.[A subsequent reference are given parentheticaly
afer quotton.)
1 3. Sigund Feud, Civlition and it Dicontt i Simund Freud: Civlition, Sciet and
ReliOf Hanondswrth 1985, p. 337.
.
14. Slavj Z kT Sublim Object oIeolog London 1 989. p. 45.
230
Not
15. Ibid., p. 125.
16. Se
Fdric Jameon, Th Poltical Unoniou Conclusion.
17. Fr a general surey of ths prio, se H. Start Hughes, Cnciouns and Soiel
Lndon 1959.
18. Gre Srl, Reection on Violnce, Glenco, Illinois 1950, p. 140.
19. Ibid. p. 167.
20. Ibid., p. 168.
21. Walter Benjamn, 'Surealism', in One-Way Street, London 1978, p. 238.
22. SeB. Halpr 'Myth ad Ideology', i Hitor and Thor no. I, 1961.
23. Se Claude Lev-Srauss, Strctural Anthropolog London 1968; and The Sl/ag Mind,
London 1966.
2+. Waltr Benjamn, Gsmmelt Weke, R Tiedemann and TW. Adoro, e, Furt
1966, vL 5, p. 505.
25. Se F Keroe, The&n ofan Ending New York 1967, pp. 1 12-13.
7 DI S COURSE AND I DE OL OGY
1. VN. Voloshinov, Marim and the Philoophy o Lnguage, New York 1973, p. 9.
2. Ibid . p. 13.
3. Thompson, Studie in th Thor ofIdeolog, p. 132.
4. Se, fr exple, William Lbov, So.ciolinguitic Pattr Phiadelphia 1972; Malcolm
Cultard. Intrdution to Dicour Analysi Harlow 1977; M Halliday, Lnguge 0Social
Smiotic, London 1978; Gunter Kres and Roger Hodge, Lnguge 0Ieolog London 1979;
Rge Fwler. Litrature 0 Social Dicoure, London 1981; and Diae Macdonell. Theorie of
Dioure, Oxford 1986.
5. Rsnd Cowa and Joh Elis, Lnguag and Matrialism, London 1977, p. 73.
6. Se my disusion of this topic in Th Function ofCriticism, London 1984, pp. 1 02.
7. Rland Barthe, Mytllogies London 1972. p. 143.
8. Christopher Norris, Pul d Man: Decontrction and th Crtiqu o Aethtic Ideolog
London 1988, pp. 489.
9. Pul de M The Reine to Thor Minneaplis 1986, p. 11.
10. Se in partcular Bar Hindess and Paul Hirt Pre-Cpitlit Mode ofPrdution
London 1975. and Mode o Production and Scial Fralion, London 1977. John Frow promote a
simlar 'smiotic' theor ofidelogy in his Marim and Literar Histor Oxford 1986, pp. 55-8.
It. A Cuter. B. Hindess. P. Hirst and A Hussin. Mar's 'Cpital' and Cpitalim 1bday
vol 1, London 1977, pp. 222, 236.
12. Ibid., p. 237.
13. Emeto Lclau and Chantal Moufe, Hegmony and Sialit Stratg London 1985. (Al
pge rferncs to ts work wlbgivn parenthetcally after quottons.)
ZJI
F U R T HE R R E A D I N G
Fr those lookng for an excellent book-length intoducton to te topic of
ideology, Jorge Larrain's The Concet o Ideolog u difcult to match in
hstorical scope and analytc power. It can be supplemented by te deeply
tendentous tde essay of George Licthei's Te Cncet oIdeolog and Other
Es a
y
and by the brief but suggestve essay on ideolog contained in
Raymond Wiliams's Marism and Literature. Raymond Geuss's The Ide o a
Crtical Teor is a parcularly elegant, rigorous study of te queston. wit
special reference to mFrankfurt School, whle John.. Thompson's Studie
in the Teor oIdeolog ranges usefully "from Castoriadis to Habermas fom a
positon broadly sympatetc to the later.
Classic Maist texts on te subject are Mar and Engels, The Geran
Ieolog; Mar's capter on commodity fetshism in CpitalVolume 1 ; Georg
Lukacs's essay on 'Reficaton and the Conciousness of te Proletariat' in
Hitor and ClasConciounes; VN. Voloshov's Marism and the Philosophy o
Language; and Louis Althusser's now celebrated essay on 'Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatses' in Lenin and Philosophy
ZJJ
INDE X
Abercrombie, N., Hill, S., and B.
Turer, Tie Dominant Ieolog Thesi
35, 36, 37
Adoro, Theodor 46, 47, 87, 100, 1 10.
128. 131, 1 36
and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of
Enlihtenmet 127
Negative Dialectic 126
aethetc, Kantian 19, 20, 162
agency xii. 140-41. 198, 21 5, 216
alienaton 47, 70, 84, 136, 142
Althuser, Louis 191, 194
concept ofideology in 18, 19, 20, 21,
44, 50, 58, 60, 1 15, 139. 148-52
pas im
Es ys in S!Criticism 138
FrMar 137
on ideoloical state appartuse 67,
147, 156
and the soial formaton 153, 154
and subjectvaton 1 36, 141-6 pasim,
163, 176, 177, 198
Tacttus Theologico-Politicu 146
Anderon, Pery 1 1 2. 146, 219. 228 n3
Arstotle 12, 1 72, 173
Ausrn,]L 19, 93
Bachelard, Gaston 71
Bacon, Frncis, NOlm Ornum 161
Bakhtn, Mikhail 107
Balbar, Etienne 85, 135
Bares, Bar 138
Barthes. Rland 58, 68, 200
Mythologie 199
base, Marxist concept of73, 74, 80. 81,
82, 85, 100, 148, 1 79, 195
Baudrllard,Jean 38, 39, 42, 166
Beckett, Samuel 23
Benjamin, Walter 185, 187, 191
Bentham,Jeremy 78. 181
Bergson, Her 162, 187
Bertein. Eduard 90
Bloch, Ert, Te Pincile oHopr
185
. Bnapare. Napleon 67-8, 70, 78
Boudon, Raymond 154
235
Idolog
Bourdieu, Piere 50, 58, 188
Ditinctio n 158
Outline ofa Theor o Practice 156, 157
Qion de slgi 157
Brecht, Berolt 7, 188
Burk, Edmund 79
Callinicos, Aex 11, 85
Cpitl (Mar) 69, 84, 85, 87, 88, 91,
104, 125
capitsm 6, 26, 59, 60, 85, 86, 87, 100,
101, 103, 104, 107, 1 1 2, 1 13, 1 16, 125,
131, 154, 155, 162, 171, 185, 218
advanced 4, 34-9 pas im, 41, 42, 75,
1 12, 1 27, 128, 198, 220
cvsociety 1 1 3, 114, 1 1 5, 116
clas 13, 101, 154, 21 1 , 21 2, 215
defning concept of ideology 1,
29, 43, 45, 102, 1 1 1
domnant see rling class
soet 150, 151, 185, 206
stugle xi, 69, 80, 82, 84, 90, 147,
166, 196, 218, 228 n
se alo consciousness, class; ruling
clas; workig class
Colerdge, Smuel Taylor 66
commoity
excange 125, 126, 136
fethism 30, 37, 4, 46, 59, 84-8
pas im 95, 97, 100, 101, 102, 1 03,
109, 112
form 98, 99, 104, 105
communism 81, 149, 150, 228 n3
Condillac, Etene de 66, 78
Condorcet Marquis de 72
Conrd, Joeph 107
concousnes 47, 59, 64, 65, 69, 70-73,
85, 93, 94, 1 93, 194
class 44, 57, 86, 99, 100, 104, 105,
1 10, 1 1 1, 122, 149
and legtmaton 37, 45, 4
and materalist theor 33, 74, 76, 77,
78, 80, 81 , 82
popular 120
practcal 48, 49, 50, 54, 75, 138
see (lo false consciousnes;
working-class consiousnes
consumersm 37, 39, 42
Coward. Rosalind 1 1, 197
critque xv, 171
emancipator 132
ideology 39, 59, 72, 106, 108, 133,
134, 136, 177, 1 85, 200, 21 9
Culler,Jonathan 41
culturalism 36, 39
cultre 38, 114, 1 1 5, 120, 179
as synonymous with ideoloy 28-9,
181, 182
cynicism 38, 41, 42, 61
Davidson, Donald 13, 1 4
deconstruction 128, 131
de Man, Pul 24, 203
The Resitnce to Teor 200
Derrda,Jacques 36, 197
Dews, Peter 145
disour
and ideology 8, 9, 16, 21, 22, 23, 29,
31, 154-5, 194, 209, 21 3, 221, 223
post-Marst theoriaton of202-3,
218, 219
theor 195, 196, 1 97, 210
dominaton 14, 31, 55, 116, 128, 130,
132, 154, 175, 180
Te Dominnt Ieolog Theis
(Abercrombie, Hlland Turer) 35,
36, 56
Durkheim, Emle 3
ZJ6
The Elementr Fr ofReliiou Li
153
.
Rule ofSociological Method 71, 153
Inde
economism 87, 99, 148, 1 53, 21 3, 219
E11is,John 1 1, 197
Elster, Jon 14
emancipaton xii, xiv, 57, 96, 99, 182
empircism 64, 75, 76, 77, 159, 208,
210
Engels, Fredrch 43, 66, 71, 72, 76, 83,
89, 90, 104, 105, 161, 177
Anti-Dihring 89
and KdMar, 1e Gean Ieolg
44, 47, 56, 59, 70, 71, 73, 74, 75,
77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 87, 88, 89, 90,
91, 1 1 7, 121, 1 34, 149, 165
Enlightenment 5, 77, 159, 189
rtonality xiv, 64, 72, 138, 178
exchange value 86, 125, 127
fact
mystfcaton as 86
and value 17, 99, 132
false consciousnes7, 10, 18, 25, 53, 93,
94, 95, 96, 1 17, 161, 1 63, 176
te b against 1 1, 12, 13, 14, IS, 17,
22, 23, 24, 26
as defned by Engels 89, 90
enlightened 27, 39, 40
immediate experence 98, 99
and Lukacs 104, 106
and Mar 71, 72, 75, 78, 79, 87, 88,
105, 177
facism 7, 9, 1 01, 1 27, 1 53, 188, 198
feminsm 6, 7, 61, 69, 153, 166, 206, 211,
218
feudalism 1 13, 154
Fuerbach, Ludwg 77
1e Es nce o Chritianit 72
feld, concept of in Bourdieu 157
Fish, Stanley 68, 167-72, 175
Doing what Cme Naturall 202
Fucault, Micel 7, 8, 47, 1 1 0, 137, 146,
167, 169, 219
Frankfurt Scool 36, 4, 47, 126, 127,
128, 130, 185, 198
Freud, Sigmund 175, 182
The Futur o an Ilusion 177, 1 78-
9,
183
and ideology 89, 1 33, 134, 135, 136,
176, 184, 185
see aho superego; unconscious,
Freudian
Freudianism 1 32, 183, 189
Gadamer, Hans-Georg 128, 174
Gert, Cliford 151
gender 1 3
Geras, Norman 86
The Geman Ideolog(Mar and Engels)
44, 47, 56, 59, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, 75,
77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91,
1 17, 1 21, 134, 149, 165
Godwin, William 66
Geuss, Raymond 24, 25, 43
Goldman, Lucien 46, 1 10, 1 21
1e Hidden God 1 1 1
TwardaSodologoftheNovl 112
Gouldner, Avin 4, 154, 155
Gramsci, Atonio 36, 50, 1 37, 1 47, 178,
179, 188
concept of ideology in 46, 149
on hegemony 11 2, 1 13, 1 15, 116, 1 17,
1 58
on intellectuals 1 18, 1 1 9, 120, 121
Pron Notbook 1 16, 122, 1 23
Gunn, Thor xii
Haberas,Jirgen 1 4, 47, 128, 1 29-34,
1 36, 155, 229 nI l
Lgtimation Crsi 37
Tward a Rational Sacicn37
habitus, concept of in Bourdieu 156
Hardy, Thomas, The Retur ofthe Native
59
ZJZ
?
/
Ideolog
Heaney, Seamus 200
Hegel, G.W.F xii, 3, 78, 94, 99, 1 51, 161
The Phenomenolog ofSpirit 70, 98
Hegemony and Socialit Strateg(adau
and Moufe) 21 5, 217, 21 8
hegemony, concept of 1 1 2-17, 120, 122,
158, 179, 180, 21 5-17, 228 n21
Heidegger, Martin 3, 164, 200
Helvetius, Claude 66, 160
Hindess, Bar 203-6, 208, 209, 21 0,
21 2-16, 21 8
Hirschman, Albert 160
Hirst, Paul 22, 203-6, 208, 209, 21 0,
21 2-16, 218
historical materialism 74, 90, 91, 104,
1 36, 1 40
Histor and Clas Cnsciounes (ukacs)
94, 95, 98, 1 00, 102, 103, 1 04
Hobbes, Thomas 78, 159, 165, 181
Holbac, P. d' 66
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor
Adoro, Dialectic oEnlihtenment
127
Howard, Dick 154
Hume, David 1 59, 21 9
idealism 36, 67, 72, 76, 78, 99, 1 53, 193,
199
identity thinkng 2, 126, 127, 128
idelogy x, 1 -3, 10, 28, 43-5, 48, 49, 51,
63, 69, 107, 109, 1 1 0, 164, 165, 166,
193, 199, 221, 224
in Adoro 126, 1 27, 128
Althusserian defniton of 18-21, 50,
58, 141, 142, 144, 146-50, 1 52,
153, 198
and Bourdieu 158, 188
and discourse 16, 29, 135, 1 94, 195,
196, 202, 209, 223
dominant 27, 30, 347, 41, 45-7, 56,
81, 83, 11 2, 122, 1 23, 134, 222
end of xii, 4, 5, 38, 39, 42, 1 54, 182,
225 nl
Freudian concept of 176, 177, 181,
185
Gramscian theorof 1 16, 1 1 7, 119
in Habennas 128, 129, 132, 155
in Lukacs 3, 59, 87, 99, 100, 101,
102-3, 105, 106
Marx and 1 1, 30, 66, 70, 72, 76-80,
82, 83, 91, 1 25
and science 64, 65, 66, 67, 95, 1 1 1,
137, 138, 139, 140, 159
see alo critque, of ideology; false
consciousness
imperialism 96, 97, 107, 175
intelligentsia 1 18, 1 19, 120, 1 21, 123
interests
and defnition of ideology 1, 9-10,
29, 160, 221, 223
pose-Marist theorization of21 2-13,
217
postmodernist theorzation of 165,
166, 167, 172-3
irony 11, 40, 60
Jameson, Fredric 126, 184
Jeferson. Thomas 69
Kant, Immanuel 19, 20, 1 1 1, 162, 172,
173, 189
Keat, Russell 136
Kennedy, Emmet 69
Kermode, Frank, The Sene ofan Ending
1 91
Kolakowski, Leszek 99
Korch, Karl 95
labour 74, 85, 86, 1 33, 179
division of 1 48, 151
power 95, 125
Lacan,Jacques 1 42, 1 44, 145, 176, 182
2J8
Ine

Laclau, Ereto 174, 216, 21 9
and Chantl Moufe, Hegemony and
Socialit Strate 21 5, 217, 218
language
and ideolog 9, 16, 17, 26, 129, 195,
196, 200, 202
and solidart 1 3, 14
see alo discourse
Laplanche,J. 51
Larrin,Jorge 86
Lawrnce, D.H. 162
Leavis, ER 200
Leforr Claude ISS
the left 6, 8, 61, 68, 1 19, 170, 21 8, 21 9
legitmaton I, 5-, 7, 29, 43, 54-, 1 1 0,
1 57, 202, 209
Lenin, y1. 44, 77, 79, 1 1 4, 1 1 5, 138, 139
What I T Be Done? 90
Leninism 91, 1 1 4, 141
Levi, Primo, The Droled and the Saved
166
Lvi-Strauss, Claude 188
liberalism 6, 61
literture 22, 23, 24, 1 35
Locke,John 64, 76
Lukacs, Georg 3, 93, 1 1 0, 1 12, 121, 122,
132, 136, 149
Hiwr and Clas Conciounes 94, 95,
98, 100, 102, 103, 104
and revolutionar subject 46, 77, 96,
97, 1 18
see alo ideology, in Lukacs
Lyotard,Jean-Franois 166
Macherey, Piere 46, 135
Manneim, Karl 46, 109, 1 1 0
. Ideolog and Uwpia 107-8
Maoism 26
Marcuse, Herbert 46, 47, 185
One-Dimenional Man 127
Mr Karl 3, 35; 60, 65, 68, 106, I l l,
1 1 3, 1 38, 1 40, 161, 162, 164, 1 70, 171,
1 77, 1 82
Cpitl 69, 84, 85, 87, 88, 91, 1 04,
125
Economic and Philosophical Manucrit
70
The Eihteenth Brumaire 55, lOS
and Friedrich Engels, The Geran
Ideolog 44, 47, 56, 59, 69, 70, 71,
73, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 87,
88, 89, 90, 91, 1 1 7, 121, 134, 1 49,
165
Preface to the Critique o Political
Economy 80
Theories o Surlu Vlue 80, 133
see alo commodit, fetshism of
ideology, Mr and
Marism 57, 94, 99, 1 00, 106, 1 31, 170,
171, 172, 173, 183, 186, 1 97, 198
and consciousness 77, 81, 93, 1 03, 1 1 8
rsroricist 91 , 101, I I I, 122, 123, 222
Wester 36, 137, 146, 153
materialism 33, 66, 70, 73, 76, 197, 199
see alo historical materalsm
McCarey, Joe 89
McCarthy, Thomas 132
media 34, 35, 37, 39
Mehrng, Fran 89
Mepham, John 86
MIl,John Stuart IS
Minogue, Keneth 6
Mitchell, WJ.T 76, 77
modersm 1 31, 199
monarchy 1 1 , 44, 60, ISS
Moncesquieu, Charles 72
Moufe, Chantal 21 6, 219
and Emesto Ldau, Hegemony and
Socialist Strateg 21 5, 217, 21 8
mystfication 6, 7, 26, 28, 86, 1 09, 1 1 0,
1 78, 191, 209
myth 185-91 pasim 199
ZJ
M
natonsI189-90
ntrton 581, 116, 199, 200, 202,
222
ntre 59, ISS, 199
human 60
Nietsce, Fredrc 175, 186
concept of ideolo and 55, 140,
141, 164, 165
and post-Mt tought 203, 205
and power 8, 9, 1 0, 53, 163, 167, 168,
176, 187
Nixon. Rcrd 5
Norr, Christopher 200
Othllo (Shakepee) 54
Prekh, Bhiku 97
Preto, Vilfredo 52
Teatie o Geeal Sociowg 186
patiarcy 13, 196
Pearson. Kn 138
Peceux, Micel 196, 197
Lnguage, Semantic and Ieolog 195
PlamenatJohldeolog 202
Plekhanov, G.Y 9
Pontalis,J.-B. 51
pst-Marism 109, 203, 204, 206, 208,
209, 210, 215-1 9
pstoderm xi, xii, 10, 38, 39, 43,
61, 1 07, 165, 166, 169, 171, 201
post-stuctralism x, 41, 126, 127, 128,
162, 198, 201, 216, 219
Poulantas, Nicos 101, 121, 122, 154,
229 n32
pwer xi, xiii, 1 1, 33, 36, 45, 46, 47, 64,
83, 1 16, 180, 201, 221
strggles 8, 16, 81, 110, 1 1 3. 223
se al legitmaton; Niete, and
pwer
Pretle, Joseph 66
Pron Notebook (Gramsci) 1 16. 122, 123
prucon 82, 83
moe of xi, 47, 80, 100
proper, private 66
pschoanalysis xv, 52, 197
and crtque ofideology 133, 136,
177
Freudian 179, 181
Lcnian 137, 144
rce 13
rcsm 21, 23, 51, 1 12, 148, 170
rtonality x , 12
communicatve 129-33
Enightenment xiv, 138, 178
rtonton 51-4, 61, 89, 98, 103,
165, 202, 222
relism
literr 200
morl 17, 18
reformm 35, 40, 210, 218
reifcaton 4, 47, 59, 70, 95, 97, 98, 99,
100, 102, 103, 104, 1 12, 1 36, 193
religion 50, 60, 1 13, 153, 1 77, 178, 183
representaton xi, 18, 20, 30, 209, 210,
213
reoluton xi, 57, 1 00, 1 87, 197
Rusian 114
Rcrds, IA 19
Ricour, Pul 108
Rorty, Rchard 11, 68, 169, 174
Rousseau,Jen-Jacque 72
ruling class 5, 28, 30, 35, 4, 52, 55, 56,
79, 112, 122, 123, 221
Saussure, Frdinand de 209, 210, 211,
213
Shopnauer, Arthur 162, 163, 175,
176
The World Uhand Rereetlion
161
scence 87, 179
?10
Ine
and ideology 64, 65, 66, 67, 95, 139,
1 52, 154, 1 55, 1 59
Marxism as 1 04, 1 1 1 , 128. 137, 138.
1 40, 1 43
Scond Intertonal 89, 94, 95, 104,
186
self-decepton, concept of 53
Sliger. Martn 6-7, 1 1
Ideolg and Politic 48
sexism 9, 26, 148
ShIs, Edward 4
Skllen, Tony 26
Sloterdik Peter 27, 39, 40
Smith, Adam 1 33, 149, 171
soialism 59, 1 05, 1 15, 1 27, 131, 166,
21 4. 218
as ideology 6, 7, 44, 61, 90
revolutionar 102, 1 87
scientfic 89
soiolog 147
of kowledge 108, 109
solidarit 1 3, 45
Sorel, George 44, 187, 188, 1 91
Rfection on Violenc 186
Spinoa, Barch 146
Stalinism 1 1 5, 121, 1 98
stte xi , 55, 57, 1 1 3, 1 16, 154
Stedman Jone, Gareth 100, 103
Stendhal, M. 69
stcturalism 37, 1 1 0, 148
subject 1 56, 199
discurive 1 96, 1 97, 198
Freudian 176-7
ideological positionng of xiv, 1,
141 -8 pasim, 222-3
see alo Alcusser, and subjectvaton;
subjectvit
subjectvit 38, 39, 43, 47, 146, 148, 223
see alo Althuser, and subjectvaton;
subject
sufagette see feminism
superego 144, 1 46. 1 80, 1 81
supertucture, Marxist concept of73,
74, 80, 81, 82. 83, 85, 88, 1 00, 125.
1 55, 179
tecnology 37, 103
Tl Que1 1 96, 1 97
television 345, 38, 39, 42, 147
Tatcher, Margart 21. 33, 34, 174
Tatcherism 33
Therbor, Goran 1 1
Tompson, E.P, The Povert ofTheor
140
Thompson,JohnR 5, 1 95
totty, social 1 08, 11 1, 1 12, 1 1 8, 173,
204, 228 n3
concept of in Lukcs 95, 96, 97, 99,
1 00, 104
Trac, Antoine Destutt de 66-70, 78
Turer, Denys 24, 53
unconscious
in Bourdieu 156
Freudian 1 34, 141, 149, 162, 1 76-7,
1 81 . 184
Lacanian 144
unversaliaton 56-8. 59 60, 61, 202,
222
use value 125, 127
utopia 109, 127, 1 31, 1 32, 1 85
value 18
and fact 17, 99. 1 32
surplus 86
see alo exchange value; use value
Vattmo, Gianni 225 nl
Voloshinov, VN. 48, 49, 50
Marim and the Philosophy o
Lnguge 1 94, 195, 196
wage-relaton 85
241
Ieolog
Te Wste lnd (liot) 188
Weber, M 98
Williams, Rymond 47, 48, 75-, 1 1 5
Keord 9-10
Wittgenstein. Ludwig 88, 168, 174, 193
women xiv, 57, 69, 96, 153, 206, 21 1, 21 8
C alo feminism
Wordsworth. William 59
Yeats, W.. 24
2ek Slavoj 40, 184
242