Ideology & Society
0011 0010 1010 1101 0001 0100 1011
1
2
4
Marxist Tradition and Jameson
Outline
0011 0010 1010 1101 0001 0100 1011
•
•
•
•
Starting Questions
Central Debates in Marxism after Marx
Althusser on Ideology
Jameson on Interpretation
1
2
4
Starting Questions
I. Basics:
• What are the central issues of debate engaged by
0011 0010
1010
1101 0001
0100
1011
both
Althusser
and
Jameson?
• What is ideology as it is defined by Althusser?
• What are Jameson’s views of Marxist interpretation?
• How does Althusser revise Marxist tradition by
connecting it with structuralism and psychoanalysis?
• How does Jameson engage Bakhtin and
structuralism in his theory of interpretation?
II. 思與辨
1
2
4
• What makes Bakhtin and Foucault related to
Marxism, and what separates the two from the latter?
• How do Bakhtin, Foucault and Althusser describe
society or social formation differently?
• How is discourse or power defined by Foucault
similar to or different from ideology as Althusser
defines it?
After Marx: History
1. Vulgar Marxism
Leninism
and0100
the1011
Second International –
0011• 0010
1010 1101 0001
– simplification and indoctrination of Marx (e.g. ideology
= false consciousness)
– Zhdanovism (Reflectionism); revolution (Trotskyism)
– Stalinism
– Russian Formalism (Mikhail Bakhtin )
1
2
2. Western Marxism (e.g. Frankfurt School)
3. Poststructuralist (scientific) turn—Althusser,
( T. Eagleton)
4. American (F. Jameson) and British Marxism (R.
Williams and T. Eagleton)
5. Post-Marxist (E. Laclau and C Mouffe)—against
its totalizing schema
4
After Marx: Historical Turning
Points
0011 0010 1010 1101 0001 0100 1011
•
[October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution] German
Ideology published in 1920’s. Stalinism; party
= proletariat; dogmatization of Marx
 Western Marxism
• May 1968(// civil rights movements in the States)
Traditional Marxism cannot account for this
new social formation, or cultural revolution.
•  Western Marxism gets to dominate as well as
be transformed;
•  Foucault’s turn (from structuralist or discourse
approach) to power and domination.
1
2
4
After Marx: Central Issues for
Debate
0011 0010 1010 1101 0001 0100 1011
• Determinism, economic determinism
• Reflectionism (1) social homology; (2) literature
reflecting society and serving Communist causes.
(tendentious or not)
• Base and Super Structure; Literature/Culture and
society (and the role of Marxist criticism)
• Definitions of class, exploitation and capitalism,
possibilities of revolution ( cultural revolution)
• Definitions of ideology –negative or positive, its
influence on human subjects and interrelations
with discourse.
1
2
4
After Marx: Central Debates (2)
0011 0010 1010 1101 0001 0100 1011
• Determinism
• Scientific Marxism –
more economistic
• e.g. Althusser, New Left
Review
•(Alvin Gouldner The Two Marxisms)
• Voluntarism or humanism
• critical theory – rejects the
base-superstructure
metaphor in favor of a less
well-defined totality.
• e.g. Lukacs, The Frankfurt
school  Raymond
Williams, etc.
1
2
4
The persistent: the dialectics (in both action and thinking).
Engels Natural Dialectics 三大規律: 量化為質，質化為量，
對立元互相滲透，否定的否定．
Western Marxism
0011 0010 1010 1101 0001 0100 1011
• reacted against Leninism;
• Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci（1891-1937,
the Frankfurt School in Germany and the
existential Marxists in France after World War
II.
• Supplement classical Marxism with
existentialism or psychoanalysis.
• Shifts the attention of critical theory away from
the means and relations of production toward
issues of everyday life and culture.
• (source: Mark Poster
http://www.humanities.uci.edu/mposter/books/)
1
2
4
Ideology: different views
•
Engels: ideology = false consciousness and
ignorance
0011• 0010
1010 1101
0001 0100 1011
Lenin:
bourgeois
vs. socialist ideology
• Bakhtin: denies the distinction between the
intrinsic and the extrinsic; Both consciousness
and ideology are semiotic, whether in the form
of "inner speech" or in the process of verbal
interaction with others, or in mediated forms like
writing and art.
• Gramsci: "historically organic ideologies“ +
repressive, arbitrary ideology
• Althusser: has material base; constitute
subjectivities and their imaginary relations with
society to ensure the power of the dominant
group
1
2
4
Ideology: different views (2)
0011 0010 1010 1101 0001 0100 1011
Foucault -1. Power does not just reproduce
relations of production; more pluralistic,
localized. (e.g. the carceral)
2. Discourse// ideology: constitute subject
3. Against ideology, because –
1
2
4
1) Ideology implies an opponent -- truth.
2) ideology stands in a secondary position
relative to something which functions as its
base, as its material economic
determinant.
Althusser
0011 0010 1010 1101 0001 0100 1011
• Anti-Humanism (like Levi-Strauss, Lacan,
Foucault, Derrida);
• Structuralist Marxism, renovation of historical
materialism. (social formation – a more decentered view of social causality)
• Separates Ideology from science—divide
Marx’s work into three periods: ideological,
transitional and scientific
• Borrow from Freud and Lacan: “the
Imaginary” (ideology); mirror stage
1
2
4
Jameson "On Interpretation"
0011 0010 1010 1101 0001 0100 1011
•
•
•
•
•
dialectical criticism & metacommentary
mediation,
three levels of interpretation;
History
Issues for Debate
1
2
4
metacommentary
• -- "Interpretation is here construed as an
essentially allegorical act, which consists in
rewriting a given text in terms of a particular
interpretive master code." (10)
-- will always recognise the historical origins
of its own concepts, the "master codes" it
uses, and will never allow the concepts to
ossify and become insensitive to the
presuure of reality.
--will seek to unmask the inner form of a
genre or body of texts and will work from the
surface of a work inward to the level where
literary form is deeply related to the concrete.
0011 0010 1010 1101 0001 0100 1011
1
2
4
Three levels' of Causality -0011 0010 1010 1101 0001 0100 1011
• Jameson's criticism of Althusser
• 1.mechanical causality (billiard ball
causality) applicable to analysis of local
events
2. Hegel's and Stalin's "expressive causality"
--homogeniety of the levels and totalization
3. Structural causality – Althusser’s
1
2
4
Mediation –revised view of social
totality
0011 0010 1010 1101 0001 0100 1011
• Mediation is the classical dialectical term for the
establishment of relationship between, say, the
formal analysis of a work of art and its social
ground, or between the internal dynamics of the
political state and its economic base.
• -- a process of transcoding: as the invention of a
set of terms, the strategic choice of a particular
code or language, such that the same
terminology can be used to analyze and
articulate two quite distinct types of objects or
"text," . . . (40)
1
2
4
Mediation (2) –revised view of
social totality
0011 0010 1010 1101 0001 0100 1011
Different kinds of mediation
1. Through separation and differentiation -structural causality
2. through identification -- expressive causality
"Althusserian structural causality is therefore
just as fundamentally a practice of mediation as
is the expressive causality to which it is
opposed." (41)
1
2
4
Homology vs. ultimate
determinism
0011 0010 1010 1101 0001 0100 1011
• Use contemporary materialist studies of
Language as an example to argue
against simple homology;
• Use Greimas’ semiotic to analyze the
deep structure of language (semiotic
rectangle—based on the principles of
contradiction and opposition p. 46)
1
2
4
Ideology and Lukacs’ concept of
totality –as methodolgy
0011 0010 1010 1101 0001 0100 1011
• Ideology – strategies of containment
• Totality – a methodological standard.
• Totalization – a way to unmask ideology as
strategies of containment.
• Poststructualism (e.g. Derrida, Deleuze, etc.)
reconfirm the status of the concept of totality
by their very reaction against it. (53)
• The multiplicity and discontinuity found by
poststructuralist readers should be reunified
“if not at the level of work itself, then at the
level of its process of production. . . “ (The
former –an initial moment of an Althusserian
exegesis.
1
2
4
three horizons of criticism
1. immanent analysis –
0011 0010 1010 1101 0001 0100 1011
•
•
•
Text as a symbolic act;
how history enters a text as an absent cause or
subtext (1945- 56)
Semiotic rectangle // ideological closure;
2. socio-discourse analysis –
•
•
3. Historical reading—
•
•
1
class as relational,
Text as parole in class discourse as langue –
dialogical ideologemes
2
4
Cultural revolution –both synchronic and
diachronic
Ideology of form—contradictions produced by
varied sign systems
Text as a Symbolic Act
0011 0010 1010 1101 0001 0100 1011
• Caduveo girl
• by Guido Boggiani (source)
• Construing formal
patterns as a
symbolic enactment
of the social within
the formal and
aesthetic.
1
2
4
History
0011 0010 1010 1101 0001 0100 1011
1. as an absent cause: "it [History] is
inaccessible except through textual forms.
amd . . . our approach to it and to the Real
itself necessarily passes through its prior
textualization, its narrativization in the
political unconscious." (33/1946)
-- History as Necessity: "History is what
hurts, it is what refuses desire and set
inexorable limits to individual as well as
collective praxis. . . History as ground and
untranscendable horizon. . . " (102/1959)
1
2
4
Issues for Debate
0011 0010 1010 1101 0001 0100 1011
• Do you agree with Jameson’s analysis of the
three levels of social causality?
• Do you agree with Jameson that behind the
pluralist social institutions, society itself is a
totality, “a seamless web, a single inconceivable
and transindividual process” (p. 41); that behind
historical events, there is History?
• Do you agree that mediation, or transcoding+assimilation+differentiation, is all that’s
needed in crossing disciplines and social levels?
1
2
4
References
0011 0010 1010 1101 0001 0100 1011
• Mark Poster. Foucault, Marxism and History First
published 1984 by Polity Press, Cambridge, in
association with Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
1
• David McLellan. Ideology. Buckingham: Open UP,
1st Ed. 1989, 2nd Ed. 1995.
2
4