IDEOLOGY
THE IDEAS OF THE RULING CLASS
The Ruling Ideas:
• ‘The ideal expression of the dominant
material relationships’
• ‘The dominant material relationships grasped
as ideas’
• ‘The relationships which make one class the
ruling one’
• ‘The ideas of [the ruling class’s] dominance’
• Ideas of the ruling class are expressed as
eternals laws:
“As they rule as a class and determine the extent and
compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do
this in its whole range, hence among other things
rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and
regulate and produce the ideas of their age [as
eternal laws].”
• The division of labor: Who produces the
dominant ideas?
• Ideas of the ruling class are represented as the
only rational, universally valid ones
• Universality corresponds to:
a) Class vs. Estate
b) Competition
c) Great numerical strength of the ruling class
d) Illusion of common interest
e) The delusion of the ideologists and division
of labor
• “Every new class… achieves its hegemony only
on a broader basis than that of the ruling class
previously, whereas the opposition of the nonruling class against the new ruling class later
develops all the more sharply and profoundly.”
• Discussion: Are we moving towards a more
democratic social order?
• Critique of Hegel and Idealism:
a)‘Idea’ as the dominant force in history
b)Social order to be driven by ideas rather than
materialistic relationships
c) Separation of ideas of ruling class from its
base
d)A mystical connection among the successive
ruling ideas
e)History as process of self-consciousness
IDEOLOGY
Revised by Gramsci
What Is History?
• “The historical unity of the ruling class is realized in the State,
and their history is essentially the history of States. But it
would be wrong to think that this unity is simply juridical and
political;… the fundamental historical unity, concretely, results
from the organic relations between State or political society
and “civil society”.
The Subaltern classes, by definition, are not unified and
cannot unite until they are able to become a “State”: their
history, therefore, is intertwined with that of civil society, and
thereby with the history of States and groups of States.”
Ideology:
• Its original meaning: Science of ideas/ Analysis
of ideas
• In Marxist philosophy: Contains a negative
value judgment
• As consciousness and creators of struggle and
movement (a new meaning emphasized by
Gramsci)
Ideology as the theoretical “front”
• Everything which influences or is able to
influence public opinion, directly or indirectly
So what is ideology at the end?
• Hall argues that “ideology is a mental
framework –the languages, the concepts,
categories, imagery of thought, and the
systems of representation – which different
classes and social groups deploy in order to
make sense of, define, figure out and render
intelligible the way society works.”
Ideology for Marx
• Practical Meaning:
a) The thoughts of how the
capitalist system works
through the individual’s
practical relations to it
b) The same reality can be
represented in several ways
within systems of discourse
• The Manifestation of
Bourgeois Thought:
a) A critical weapon against
Hegelianism, religion and
idealist philosophy
b) Ideology as a reflection of
material conditions
c) Economy as the last instance
d) The fixed correspondence
between dominance in the
socio-economic sphere and
the ideological: ruling ideas
are the ideas of the ruling
class
Critiques of Marx’s Idea of Ideology
• Reflexive and reductionist
• Ideology as a realm of pure dependency
• Ideology as distorted knowledge or false
consciousness’
• Distortion for Marx: Eternalization of relations
which are in fact historically specific /
Naturalization which means treating the products
of a specific historical development as if
universally valid, and arising not through
historical processes but, as it were, from Nature
itself.
How ideology works and explains
•
Individualism as the bourgeois society’s ideology
“Our ideas of “Freedom”, “Equality”, “Property” and “Bentham” (i.e.
Individualism) – the ruling ideological principles of the bourgeois lexicon… may
derive from the categories we use in our practical, common sense about the
market economy. This is how there arises, out of daily, mundane experience of
powerful categories of bourgeois legal, political, social and philosophical thought.”
•
About political Economy explanation of market
“One-sided explanations are always a distortion. Not in the sense that they are a
lie about the system, but in the sense that a “half-truth” cannot be the whole truth
about anything. With those ideas you will always represent a part of the whole.
You will thereby produce an explanation which is only partially adequate- and in
that sense “false”. Also, if you use only market categories and concepts to
understand the capitalist circuit as a whole, there are literally many aspects of it
which you cannot see. In that sense, the categories of market exchange obscure
and mystify our understanding of the capitalist process: that is they do not enable
us to see or formulate other aspects invisible.”
Base And Superstructure
• Marx: Base as the material relations of
production (economy), superstructure as the
non-material representation of the same
relations (including State, religion, culture, etc.)
• In Marx’s theories and later in mainstream
Marxism, superstructure is determined by base.
• Stuart Hall: “The language of determinism and
even more of determinism was inherited from
idealist and especially theological accounts.”
The simple notion of superstructure: the reflection,
the imitation or the reproduction of the reality of
the base in the superstructure in a more or less
direct way
The Amendments in the
notion of Superstructure
• Delay in times – famous
lags
• Mediation
• Homologous Structure
• Totality
• Superstructure as
‘practice’ rather than
object
• Gramsci’s Critique of Marxist BaseSuperstructure:
Hegemony: “it suggests the existence of something which is truly
total, which is not merely secondary or superstructural …And
hegemony has the advantage over general notions of totality,
that at the same time emphasizes the facts of domination.”
Hegemony
• Hegemony is a form of control exercised
primarily through a society's superstructure-central system of practices, meanings and
values.
Gramsci’s Theory
• “A study of how the ideological structure of a
dominant class is actually organized: namely
the material organization aimed at
maintaining, defending and developing the
theoretical or ideological “front”.”
Mean Girls
• http://youtu.be/X34Jo5OAJ6s
• http://youtu.be/oagshW5DQDI?hd=1
Hegemony Expanded
Williams’ Theory:
• “We have to emphasize that hegemony is not
singular; indeed that its own internal
structures are highly complex, and have
continually to be renewed, recreated and
defended; and by the same token, that they
can be continually challenged and in certain
respects modified”
Hegemony Expanded
• Hegemony works to Distinguish the large
features of different epochs of society, as
between feudal and bourgeois, or what might
be, than at distinguishing between different
phases of bourgeois society, and different
moments within the phases.
Selective Tradition
• Within the terms of an effective dominant
culture, is always passed off as ‘the tradition’,
‘the significant past’
• selectivity is the point; the way in which from
a whole possible area of past and present,
certain meanings and practices are chosen for
emphasis, certain other meanings and
practices are neglected and excluded.
Althusser
Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA)
• “A certain number of realities which present
themselves to the immediate observer in the
form of distinct and specialized institutions.”
ISA Institutions
• The religious ISA (the system of the different Churches),
• The educational ISA (the system of the different public and
private “Schools”)
• The family ISA
• The legal ISA
• The political ISA (the political system, including the
different Parties),
• The trade-union ISA,
• The communications ISA (press, radio and television, etc.),
• The cultural ISA (Literature, the Arts, sports, etc.).
ISA
• Althusser states, “The class (or class alliance)
in power cannot lay down the law in the ISAs
as easily as it can in the (repressive) State
apparatus, not only because the former ruling
classes are able to retain strong positions
there for a long time, but also because the
resistance of the exploited classes”
Functions of ISA
• State Apparatus rather I or R function both by
violence and by ideology
• Ideological State Apparatus functions
massively and predominantly by Ideology and
secondly by repressive (The Greatest
Distinction)
Functions of ISA
• ISA’s contribute to reproduction of the
relations of production by disseminating ideas
to be commonly held (ideology) and work in
concert with minimal contradiction of class
structure: ruling class power and proletariat
oppression.
• “Belief derives from the ideas of the individual
concerned, with a consciousness which contains
the ideas of his belief. In this way, by means of
the absolutely ideological “conceptual” device.”
• “The individual in question behaves in such and
such a way, adopts such and such a practical
attitude, and, what is more, participates in
certain regular practices which are those of the
ideological apparatus on which “depend” the
ideas which he has in all consciousness freely
chosen as a subject.”
The Truman Show
• http://youtu.be/NwyVbvVtL6U
Althusser’s Theory
• There is no practice except by and in an
ideology
• There is no ideology except by the subject and
for subjects
Interpellations
By the category of the subject
• ‘the category of the subject is only
constitutive of all ideology insofar as all
ideology has the function (which defines it) of
“constituting” concrete individuals as
subjects.”
Obviousness
• Like all obviousness’s, including those that
make a word “name a thing” or “have a
meaning” the “obviousness” that you and I
are subjects – and that that does not cause
any problems – is an ideological effect, the
elementary ideological effect
Functions of Interpellations
• Ideological recognition
• The second ideological function being
misrecognition
• You and I are always already subjects, and as
such constantly practice the rituals of ideological
recognition, which guarantee for us that we are
indeed concrete, individual, distinguishable and
(naturally) irreplaceable subjects.
• This ideological recognition is our Consciousness
The Subject Matter
• “All ideology hails or interpellates concrete
individuals as concrete subjects, by the
functioning of the category of the subject”
• Ideology “acts” or “functions” in such a way
that it “recruits” subjects among the
individuals, or “transforms” the individuals
into subjects by that very precise operation
which I have called interpellation or hailing.”