Maja Breznik
The Conflict between the Concepts “Ideology” and “Representation” in Contemporary
Social Sciences
When answering the question about how to examine the social dimension of cultural
practices, contemporary theories of culture (like French “cultural history", American
“new cultural history” or British “cultural studies”) rather rigidly advocate the theory of
representation. They conceive the notion of "representation" as the most suitable, if
not the only adequate tool to analyse the social dimension of culture. They have
taken the expression “representation” from anthropology which, in turn, refers to
Durkheim’s term “social representation”. Instead of "representation", they sometimes
use the expression “shared meaning”, pointing to the fact that these “meanings” are
shared by all the members of a group or a society. The followers of all the three
theoretical approaches mentioned above contend that they use “representational
theory” as a substitute for the “theory of ideology” which, according to them, had
ended up upon the dump heap of the human sciences. Since I am not convinced that
this substitution has been performed with sufficient argumentation, I will examine the
arguments that have led to the replacement of the term “ideology” by
“representation”.
Merton’s Copernican revolution in social sciences
Given the enormous quantity of contributions that have recently or less recently been
dedicated to the question of ideology, we have to choose our starting point with
“strategic considerations” in mind. Some decades ago, the American sociologist
Robert Merton offered a contribution that should not be relegated to the museum of
social sciences. However, his argument opens into much larger a horizon than we
may have initially expected and, consequently, that we may have a firm control upon.
According to Merton, the question of ideology extends widely beyond the simple
investigation of “false consciousness”, “lie”, “reflection”, “representation” and so on.
For him, the question of ideology touches the very fundamentals of every theoretical
approach. Merton underlines the fact that every scientific research – its methods,
techniques, assumptions … or its truth, as they are conceived within a particular
approach – is historically determined or conditioned: as a consequence, the
achievements of social sciences can not be taken as such, simply as truths, but have
to be evaluated from the historical point of view. They are truths only conditionally,
from the point of view of their own scientific endeavour, from the point of view of the
theoretical work that has produced these truths. However, when scientific approach
changes terrain, then old truths automatically make space for new truths. Merton
concludes that this insight produces a “revolution” in social sciences, equal to that in
physics: »The 'Copernican revolution' in this area of inquiry consisted in the
hypothesis that not only error or illusion or unauthenticated belief but also the
discovery of truth was socially (historically) conditioned.«1
Choosing the theory of ideology as subject-matter, therefore requires not only to
develop the knowledge about the subject-matter itself, but obliges us above all to
question the foundation of the method and the process of comprehension. Similarly,
Louis Althusser’s contribution to the theory of ideology cannot be separated from his
comprehension of coupure epistémologique, the term by which he described the
difference (Merton’s “changing of terrain”) between Marx’s theory and the preceding
theories of political economy.
Althusser’s most important contribution to the discussion of ideology consists in the
twist he gives to the basic terms of the debate: instead of taking ideology as an
object exterior to the process of theoretical comprehension, as an object somewhere
outside and a part of “reality”, he transforms it into an object interior to the process of
theoretical comprehension, into the “content” of
the scientific process of
comprehension, into the decisive point in the discontinuity from which an epistemic
field is formed. Consequently, Althusser’s theory of ideology primarily focuses upon
the thin and subtle “demarcation line” which has the function to divide the scientific or
theoretical comprehension from the “wild thought”, i.e., from the spontaneous
ideological thought. But the “demarcation line” is shifting, and may only have a short
breath and a temporal existence; it may soon fall under the grasp of the
“spontaneous ideology” against which it has once struggled.2
1
Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Science, New York, The Free Press, chapter »The
Sociology of Knowledge«, 1968, p. 513.
2 Louis Althusser, »Lénine et la philosophie«, in: Lénine et la philosophie, suivi de Marx et Lénine
devant Hegel, Paris, Maspero, 1969.
2
To conclude, the slight and important “demarcation line” which establishes a distance
against the ideological thought, can only be drawn within the realm of theoretical
comprehension. With this important introductory remark we have to rethink
Althusser’s writings themselves and separate the practical analysis of ideological
mechanisms, such as proposed in his text Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses, from theoretical analysis of ideological mechanisms within the realm of
theoretical practices, as, for example, proposed in the texts Lenin and Philosophy
and Reading The Capital. The two types of texts do not have the same theoretical
status, so it is important to keep in mind the difference between one and the other.
When Althusser talks about coupure epistémologique, the epistemological cut, which
differentiates Marx’s approach from the earlier political economy, he points to
concrete theoretical operations and their conceptual effects that “change the terrain”
of theoretical elaboration and, as a sort of “backlash”, make the preceding
economical theories sink into the realm of ideology. By establishing the difference
between “the concrete” and “the abstract labour”, between “the use value” and “the
(exchange) value” and by generating the series of concepts which arise from these
original distinctions (surplus value, organic composition of capital, the law of capitalist
accumulation), Marx deploys the frame of a new scientific field which as such
confronts the old horizon of political economy, and, by changing the theoretical
paradigm, marks it as, and literally makes it, ideological thinking.3
As a consequence, a certain precaution should be taken regarding the theory of
ideology. It has no outer object, no object somewhere outside; ideology is rather, in
Althusser’s terms, an “object of knowledge”, and is inseparable from the process of
comprehension itself. We can illustrate our hesitation by presenting two examples of
theories, which attempted to treat ideology as an “outer” object, independent of
theoretical elaboration.
Alain Caillé and Maurice Bloch tried to isolate the realm of ideology as an identifiable
entity in particular societies. They divided the realm of ideology (the realm of rituals
and mythologies4 in the case of Bloch’s anthropological study of Madagascar, and
the ideological explanations such as “contribution to the well-being”, in the case of
Caillé’s analysis of capitalist society) from non-ideological practices which are
3
Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar et al., Lire le Capital, Paris, Quadrige, Presses Universitaires de
France, 1996 [1965].
4 It is “social theory expressed in the language of ritual”, defines Maurice Bloch. Cf. Maurice Bloch,
Ritual, History and Power, London – Atlantic Highlands, NJ, The Athlone Press, 1989.
3
supposed to be merely serving the production process and are therefore to be
considered as mere tools of production (the skills and knowledge of book-keeping in
the case of Caillé or the knowledge related to the cultivation of land in Bloch’s
example).5 The distinctions may be efficient to a certain extend if used to make
visible some form of ideology in its purity. The explanation may be suitable to
particular conditions during certain phases and perhaps even only in certain socioeconomic sectors of pre-colonial central Madagascar. It may adequately describe the
specific situation in which the dominant classes, after having established their rule,
left the pre-existent production modes partly untouched together with the pertaining
knowledge, while appending to those traditional practices a complex new religious
and political system in support of the newly imposed relations of exploitation. In this
particular case, the reference to two social cognitive systems (1. the knowledge
linked to the cultivation of land; and 2. the knowledge related to ritual and religious
practices) may be justified on the descriptive level. But otherwise, the separation of
ideological from non-ideological sustains the illusion that the sphere of production is
a kind of adaptation to the requirements of environment, while the sphere of ideology
is free of such constraints and opened for ‘imagination’, contingent conjunctions, and
so on. As I stressed above, ideology is not a lie but a necessary “social link” and a
constitutive element of every society, no matter where we search for it. 6
5
The distinction between ideological and non-ideological practices could be translated into Antonio
Gramsci’s language as the distinction of two kinds of intellectuals: the “organic intellectuals” as
technical intelligentia in contrast to “functional intellectuals”, i. e., the historically determined group of
intellectuals (as, for example, clerics in the Middle Ages). According to Caillé and Bloch, the “organic
intellectuals” would be the bearers of non-ideological practices, while “functional intellectuals” would
perform ideological practices. Cf. Antonio Gramsci, Izbrana dela, Ljubljana, CZ, 1974.
6 After having discussed at some length Althusser’s theoretical views on ideology, let me give a
remark about his most quoted article Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. There, he describes
culture, religion, law, sport, and media as ideological apparatuses that guarantee the reproduction of
society and the prolongation of its existence. He distinguishes ideological state apparatuses as “soft”
methods of social control and reproduction from the “hard” methods, exercised by repressive state
apparatuses like the army and the police. This thesis has been very much objected against by cultural
historians and scholars of cultural studies who understood it as reducing the spheres of culture, law,
science etc. to the mere function of reproduction of social relations of production. The objection is
justified, but it is unsustainable within Althusser’s opus, especially if we take as reference his book For
Marx, which would firmly deny this conclusion. But what we find interesting for our examination of
ideology in this brief exposition, are the four theses on ideology which I consider directly relevant to
the fields of cultural history and cultural studies, although most of the outstanding scholars in these
disciplines would probably reject this contention.
Althusser’s four theses on ideology can be resumed as follows:
1. Ideology “in general” has no history, its mechanisms remain the same across historical
epochs. Particular ideologies, though, do have history. Cultural studies and cultural history
have later articulated the idea contained in the second part of this thesis, as a demand that
cultural practices should be “historicized”. However, no counterpart to the first part of
Althusser’s thesis has been developed within cultural history or cultural studies. This
4
We will shift now from the theoretical analysis of ideology to contemporary theories of
culture in order to analyse their theoretical horizon. They may sometimes recapitulate
and compress preceding theoretical achievements into their “methodology”, but they
reorganize this “imported” material into a new order and into a new paradigm. I have
been speaking about theories of culture in general although they have emerged from
various traditions such as the French historical school of Annales and cultural studies
in Britain. Still, they share many common features and a common ground. They
became influential academic disciplines by promising to bring new understanding and
new interpretation to the cultural sphere. They started to expand approximately in the
same period, during the 1980s when the French group developed “histoire culturelle”,
American circle with Lynn Hunt initiated “new cultural history”, and the Centre for
Cultural Studies in Birmingham was developing “cultural studies”.
French cultural history
We will start with the French “histoire culturelle”, the heir of the famous French
historiographic group gathered around the journal Annales, established in 1929 by
historians Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre.7 Since the time of its inauguration, the
project bifurcated into two streams; as a matter of fact, the founders of the journal
themselves represented the discrepancy between two differing approaches. Studying
outstanding persons like Luther, Rabelais and Marguerite de Navarre, Lucien Febvre
developed the introspection of mental and political worlds. He presented Luther,
Rabelais or Marguerite de Navarre as the foci where the collective and individual
dimensions came together. He is also the author of the term outillage mental, mental
tools, a sort of structures of thinking which he wanted to present in his studies.
avoidance of a stronger conceptual approach has made it extremely difficult to those
disciplines to grasp structural relations among various social practices and their transformation
through time.
2. Ideology is a ‘representation’ of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions
of existence. The emphasis of this thesis is not that people present their real conditions of
existence in ideology, but that their spontaneous relations to conditions of existence are
always necessarily imaginary.
3. Ideology has material existence. In other words, ideas make part of social practices; they are
organized and articulated by social rituals, which form the essence of any ideological
apparatus, including the sphere of culture. Correlatively, “material” dimensions of social
practices, including cultural practices (buildings, tools, objects of various kinds…), are part of
ideological apparatuses. The idea contained in this thesis has later been articulated by cultural
history and cultural studies as a demand for examination of cultural practices in their material
existence.
4. Ideology interpellates individuals as subjects.
7 François Dosse, L'histoire en miettes. Des »Annales« à la »nouvelle histoire«, Paris, La Découverte,
1987.
5
Contrary to Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch combines mental presentations with a
research of actual collective practices, and presents the former as inseparable from
the later. Describing the rituals of royal treatment in Les Rois thaumaturges, he is
combining the insight into original beliefs with the description of concrete practices in
order to describe, for example, the struggle between profane and religious authorities
for unconditional domination. “The present work, in sum, is in its core a contribution
to the political history of Europe in a very large sense, in the real sense of the word”,
writes Marc Bloch in the introduction of the book.8 Later generation with Fernand
Braudel and others choose economic history and market exchanges as the central
point of their research (as Braudel’s does in his book La Civilisation matérielle).
Introducing methods of statistics and quantitative research taken from other
disciplines such as economy, sociology and geography, he really turned
historiography away from the traditional “political history”, already challenged by Marc
Bloch and Lucien Febvre.
During the 1980’s historians started to fight against the economic determinism of the
previous generation. They articulated their position as “tournant critique”, a critical
turn, which consisted primarily in the refusal of Braudel’s heritage and in the change
of the object of their research. If, during the preceding periods, culture seemed to be
a less important subject within French historiography, during the 1970’s the cultural
themes gradually grew in importance.
In 1993, historians at the Centre de recherches historique and collaborators of
Annales organised a closed conference at which they tried to define methodological
and epistemological premises of their historiographic practices. The contributions to
the conference were later published in the book Les formes de l’expérience. In his
preface to the book, Bernand Lepetit, then secretary of Annales, recapitulated some
general conclusions.9 He defined the new birth of history by the expulsion of
sociology from historiography; sociology should be expulsed, he maintained,
because of its deterministic models, its class struggles and economic flows. He even
claims, quite in the manner of contemporary revisionism in historiography, that
historians have to get rid of the wholistic theories of society, which are in themselves
“deterministic” and “totalitarian” as were totalitarian regimes projecting themselves
8
Marc Bloch, Les Rois thaumaturges, Paris, Gallimard, 1983 [1924], p. 21.
Bernand Lepetit, »Histoire des pratiques, pratique de l'histoire«, published in: Les formes de
l’expérience. Une autre histoire sociale, Paris, Albin Michel, 1995.
9
6
through (the Marxist) theory of society. According to Lepetit, historians should think
about society as of a series of practices among people, which have no “external fixed
point” /point fixe extérieur/. In other words, this is supposed to mean that these
practices are not theoretically approachable. As a consequence, within Lepetit's
horizon, it would not be possible to think about society with the help of concepts
adopted in advance and in the terms that would not be developed from inside
concrete historical formations. This statement leads to the further conclusion that it
would be possible to speak about concrete social formation or situation only in the
terms of their own language, and without any preceding theoretical generalizations.
Historians would presumably be able to approach theoretical generalizations only in
fragile terms such as identité sociale or social identity, lien social or social link, and
accord social or social agreement.
What is hidden in Lepetit’s writings but none the less important, is his refusal to see
society as a continuous social struggle among groups or classes, as an uneven
complexity of conflicts over social inequalities. If we confront his explicit arguments
with the less explicit ones, then we see that he actually creates his own theory of
society articulated as accord social or social agreement. He therefore replaces the
presentation of society as class struggle with the presentation of society as
“agreement”, as society continuously inclined to adapt itself to “historic forces” by
continually inventing or negotiating new relations among social agents, relations that
are principally based upon mutual accord instead of antagonism.10 The idea of social
negotiation brings French history close to the American “new historicism” and its
representative Stephen Greenblatt.11 We will exaggerate a little bit, but the parallel
with Benjamin’s angel of history is too tempting. The angel in Benjamin's allegory
who observes with horror the terrors and destructions, by which humanity paves its
history, would observe, according Lepetit, only the villages of Potemkin.12
10
Cf. Gérard Noiriel, Sur la 'crise' de l'histoire, Paris, Edition Belin, 1996.
Stephen Greenblatt, »Towards a Poetic of Culture«, published in: New Historicism, H. Aram Veeser
(ed.), New York – London, Routledge, 1989.
12
Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg resisted such approach in the book The Cheese and the Worms.
Ginzburg presents the story of a literate miller from the Northeast of Italy who somehow found a way
to acquire some books and, by reading them, developed a nonconformist intellectual position. This
brought him into the hands of Inquisition and finally he was condemned to perish at the stake. A selfeducated man with low social background could be an example that the limit between the elite and the
popular cultures is not clear. Ginzburg agrees that it is difficult to identify the elite and popular cultures
as separate entities, but this is so, he says, because the popular culture is a territory constantly
colonized by the dominant/elite culture. An educated miller was able to go beyond the usual limitations
of his class only by voluntarily condemning himself to silence and isolation. When the Inquisition
11
7
Theory of representation
We will now shift our discussion from the examination of general positions to the
analysis of the concept of culture. When Stephen Greenblatt and his followers study
English Renaissance theatre and William Shakespeare as the most distinguished
author at the time, they examine cultural products in the narrow sense. At the same
time, however, they understand “culture” also in the broad anthropological sense.
Roger Chartier, French cultural historian of books and reading in the ancien régime,
similarly employs both definitions of culture.
Roger Chartier is highly estimated for his solid methodological positions. He
proposes to examine cultural practices as historical phenomena (he underlines their
historicité, since, for example, the reading of the same text may be different in
various historic and geographic contexts), as material practices (he points to their
specific materialité, the area of publishing, for example, since authors do not write
“books” but “texts”), and as part of a broader context (he draws attention to their
contextualité, since they always depend on their context). In addition, he insists on
the concept of “representation”, which should, according to him, designate the new
practice of historiography.13 He uses the word “representation” in the Durkheimian
sense of “collective representation”: this allows him to compare “social positions and
relations of individuals together with how they perceive themselves and the others”.
Chartier estimates that this approach provides a chance to get rid of the old
“tyrannical predetermined social divisions”, inherited from sociology, which take into
consideration only social status or property. The “system of representations” is a little
niche which allows the historian to substitute the economical and political
contradictions and oppositions with various cultural differences such as sex, age,
confession and so on.14
undertook interrogations against him, his need to break the silence and to tell somebody his ideas was
stronger than the fear of Inquisition. For this reason, he spoke freely to his interrogators even though
his life was in danger. With this example, the author showed that miller’s achievements can not be
viewed as a transgression or negation of the class limits but, on the contrary, as confirmation of the
class division of society. Moreover, Carlo Ginzburg demonstrated in this study that it is impossible to
analyse even a seemingly modest subject-matter without taking into consideration the “holistic social
theory”, which allows to perceive the complexity of social conflicts. Cf. Carlo Ginzburg, Il Formaggio e i
vermi /The Cheese and the Worms/, Torino, Giulio Einaudi, 1976.
13 Roger Chartier, “La “Nouvelle” histoire culturelle”, published in Slov. translation: “’Nova’ kulturna
zgodovina”, Časopis za kritiko znanosti, Ljubljana, 2002, pp. 13-26.
14 “Enfin, en renonçant à la primauté tyrannique de découpage social pour rendre compte des écart
culturels, l’histoire en se dernier développments a montré, tout ensemble, qu’il est impossible de
8
We can see that at this very point Chartier, just like Bernand Lepetit, a priori refuses
the spheres of economy and politics as a historiographical object and promotes
instead the anthropological concept of culture. He understands the concept of culture
in its broad sense embracing all “symbolic practices” including art, religion, science,
rituals, festivals, techniques and so on.15
Chartier actually uses simultaneously the two meanings of the expression “culture”,
its narrow and its broad sense. But these two concepts of “culture” are not two sides
of the same coin, since it is not possible freely to jump from one sphere (specific
cultural practices and their products) to the other (social symbolism in general). Quite
to the contrary, the resemblance between them is only provisional since each
establishes its own practical or theoretical frame: “culture in the narrow sense”
embraces individualized artistic practices as painting, literature, theatre, film, and so
on, with pertaining aesthetic values and material practices, each of which has its own
internal consistency. “Culture in the broad sense”, to the contrary, is an
anthropological conception in the sense in which American anthropologist Clifford
Geertz developed it. In the investigation of society, this orientation in anthropology
bestows an unconditional primate to the sphere of culture (i.e., to the symbolic social
sphere, composed of rituals, mental structures, and so on). As a consequence, it
negates the autonomy and the specific internal consistency of artistic, intellectual,
religious practices in order to force them into the model of “symbolic social sphere” as
a whole.16
qualifier les motifs, les objets ou les pratiques culturels en termes immédiatement sociologiques et que
leur distribution et leurs usages dans une société donné ne s’organisent pas nécessairement selon
des divisions sociales préalables, identifiées à partir des différences d’autres modes d’articulation
entre les œuvres ou les pratiques et le monde social, sensibles à la fois à la pluralité des clivages qui
traversent une société et à la diversité des emplois de matériaux ou de codes partagés. Cf. Roger
Chartier, “Le Monde comme représentation”, published in: Annales ESC, Paris, 1989, n. 6, p. 15081509, our emphasis.
15 Roger Chartier tried to underline this point by the expression “histoire culturelle du social, cultural
history of society”, by which he wants to replace the old expression “histoire sociale de la culture,
social history of culture”. According to Chartier, social history of culture matches the matters of culture
to a pre-existent social history, while the cultural history of society penetrates into the questions of
making the society through the sphere of culture, and should consequently open a new and
unprecedented view upon the ‘making of society’.
16 Cf. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, London, Fontana Press, 1993 [1973]. By choosing
representation as the object of research, modern French cultural history consequently revived the old
Febvre’s concept of outillage mental, mental tools. This concept was kept alive in the post-war period
and up until now by the history of mentalities (by Michel Vovelle, for example). For a critique of the
notion of mentality, see: G.E.R. Lloyd, Demystifying Mentalities, Cambridge etc., Cambridge University
Press, 1990.
9
British cultural studies
If the French theoretical conception of cultural history originated in the opposition
against Marxism and structuralism, the British cultural studies originally took Marxism
as their starting point. Nonetheless, both schools finally developed similar theoretical
approaches. Like French cultural history, British cultural studies also use the concept
of culture in the anthropological sense, although without renouncing the theory of
ideology.
Referring to the book The Making of the English Working Class by E. P. Thompson,
Stuart Hall defines culture “in dialectic between ‘social being’ and ‘social
consciousness’”. There is not one culture only, according to Stuart Hall, but culture
should always be thought about in plural, as “cultures” instead of one “Culture”: as
“tension and conflict between cultures and their links to class cultures, class
formations and class struggles – the struggles between ‘ways of life’ rather than the
evolution of ‘a way of life’”.17 Theory of ideology is still pertinent to the research of
cultures, since clashes of cultures are tied to social positions occupied by historical
agents. As a consequence, cultural studies take as their assignments: 1. the
suppressed or hidden cultural practices (such as subcultures, mass cultures, and so
on), 2. the lived cultures with pertaining belief systems and institutions (as “folk
ideologies” from Learning to Labour by Paul Willis where he responds to the question
why working class kids get working class jobs).
On the whole, British cultural studies overtook the task to question why societies
come to be culturally “structured in dominance”. This notion, Stuart Hall warns us,
has to be taken cautiously, because of the relative autonomy of culture which derives
from two facts:
-
“Culture was as much constituted by its conditions of existence as it
constituted them.”18
-
“It [culture] was not so much the product of ‘consciousness’ as the
unconscious forms and categories through which historically definite forms of
consciousness were produced.”19
Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and the Centre: some problematics and problems”, published in:
Culture, media, Language, Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis (eds.), London
– New York, Routledge, 1992 [1980].
18 Ibidem, p. 30.
19 Ibidem, p. 31.
17
10
These two theses are not alien to Althusser. While the sphere of economy, i.e., the
structure, is the determinant instance, the superstructure is relatively autonomous.
Instances of superstructure are not pure effects of structure. Once the instances of
superstructure had emerged out of the material practices of existence where they
were intimately involved in social production, once they were – with society becoming
more complex – emancipated from the immediate production, they have obtained
their internal consistency, independent from the sphere of economy. But this can be
formulated also vice versa: since the instances of superstructure are theatres where
social conflicts are enacted, the change of internal disposition of one instance can
influence all other instances. Relations between instances are not subordinated to
mechanical functionalism and economic determinism, but rather to Freudian
mechanisms of dream work, such as displacement and condensation. These
mechanisms
continually
transform
relations
between
the
structure
and
superstructures as well as relations among instances themselves. Against economic
reductionism, Etienne Balibar refers to Althusser's theory of “structure with a
dominant”: the economy is determinant to the extent in which it determines an
instance of social structure which occupies the dominant position in the structure.20 It
is more than evident that this theory can not be blamed for economic reductionism.
Anthropological exploration of “culture”
Although cultural studies have not renounced the theory of ideology, they
nevertheless give precedence to the “theory of representations”. With the expression
“system of representation”, Stuart Hall intends to emphasize the anthropological use
of the word. Culture, he writes, is about the “shared meanings” by which we “make
sense” of things, we produce meanings and exchange them.21 Stuart Hall here
follows the anthropological reasoning: culture actually refers to a “way of life” of a
people and to their “shared values”. The words we use, the stories we tell, the
images we produce, the emotions we associate with them as well as the
classifications and conceptualisations move across “the cultural circuits” and engage
the whole population into simultaneous production and consumption of meanings.
The theory of ideology only later enters the play to explain the cases where a number
20
Cf. Lire le Capital, op. cit., p. 452.
Cf. Representation. Cultural Representation and Signifying Practices, Stuart Hall (ed.), London –
Thousand Oaks – New Delhi, Sage Publications, 1997.
21
11
of such “systems of representation” are established as coexistent. In cultural studies
theory of ideology helps to analyse the interplay between various social groups and
their social positions: between elite and popular cultures, the alternative and the
representative cultures, the culture of labour class and the bourgeois culture, and so
forth. The ideological analysis can then only confirm antagonisms between various
social groups already established by identification of their respective “shared
meanings”.
The expression “system of representations” sounds like a solid scientific notion, since
it refers to Saussure’s definition of language or any other system of communication
as a “system of signs”. The expression “system of signs” indicates that language is
constituted by phonemes, differing from each other by “distinctive features” that are
capable to separate each phoneme from all the others. Phonemes shape the
meaning although they bear no meaning themselves; for example, the difference
between the words “tail” and “sail” consists only in the initial phoneme: by the
substitution of only one phoneme by the other, the meaning of the word is changed.
(Actually, the difference between the two words melts down to only one “distinctive
feature”: “t” is opposed to “s” as “plosive” against “fricative”.) But cultural schools
have no intent to research “system of signs” in the rigid Saussurean sense. They
attempt to extend Saussure’s linguistic theory towards an anthropological
comprehension of culture in order to investigate cultures of certain social groups
(working class culture, women’s culture, homosexual culture, youth culture…) or
cultures of nations and ethnic groups.
For this reason, French cultural history and British cultural studies propose to replace
Saussure’s rigid conception of “language” with the vaguer notion of “discourse”. At
this point we should remember that Saussure distinguishes the realm of language
(“langue”) as the domain of the ideal grammatical pattern, the “system”, from the
profane language-use as everyday practice (Saussure’s “parole” which could actually
correspond to “discourse”).
At that point, all schools mentioned above found advantageous the theory of Michel
Foucault, their spiritual father. His notion of “discourse” was very attractive as well as
his undertaking to reconcile research of the vague domain of social ideas with
Saussurean structuralism. In his book The Archaeology of Knowledge, he explained
12
how the discourse as a research object should be approached.22 He defines it as a
“set of signs and practices” referring to the same object (madness, for example). But
this is not enough. The unity of discourse does not refer only to the same object of
“madness”; it actually refers to the “play of rules” which enables the emergence of the
object in certain historical circumstances. Foucault’s foundation of social discourse as
the object that which combines people's ideas with their practices seems to
correspond to Marcel Mauss’ concept of the “total social fact”. Since it consists of
ideas and practices, it should enable to produce the effect of social totalization. The
effect, though, is only illusionary, since the practices Foucault is speaking about, are
only discursive practices, not material ones. In his studies, historical concreteness is
only a spice that makes his examinations more attractive by weird examples.
Anyway, he succeeded to produce the illusion that it is possible to isolate the domain
of social ideas as an object of research and that this kind of research can, at the end,
even produce the effect of social totalization. Consequently, what Foucault produces
is an understanding of historical processes, not an analysis, and, for the same
reason, his overall position is humanistic, not critical.
The mapping of culture
The concept of culture as “shared values” could be approached in yet another way.
Historians and sociologists could start with the work of Lévi-Strauss and his use of
Saussure’s structural linguistics. Lévi-Strauss proposed to translate the linguistic
“system of signs” into the anthropological “kinship system”. He did not search the
equivalent of Saussure’s “system of signs” in cultural or intellectual practices of
primitive societies, but proposed the kinship system as the basic social system of
communication and interaction in these societies. From various types of kinship
systems he deduced the kinship atom with the most necessary elements of kinship –
uterine uncle, his married sister, her husband and their son – which should
presumably generate the many actualised systems of kinship only by the
transformation of attitudes (positive and negative attitudes with the corresponding
affects of reciprocal affection or avoidance) among the elements of the kinship atom.
The most important feature that determined which elements are to be considered as
basic for the kinship atom was their capacity to hold together the two most important
22
Cf. Michel Foucault, L’archéologie du savoir, Paris, Gallimard, 1969.
13
kinship relations – alliance and descent.23 But Lévi-Strauss also explains that he has
chosen the kinship system as the basic system of communication in primitive
societies, because there the kinship system by itself regulates all social relationships.
Anthropologist Maurice Godelier shares the same opinion and supports it with the
argument that kinship relations are, in certain types of society, able to articulate all
social relations including social production. Maurice Godelier came to this conclusion
without knowing the unpublished Louis Althusser’s critique of Lévi-Strauss. In the
posthumously published text “Sur Lévi-Strauss” Althusser reproached Lévi-Strauss
for not considering kinship relations as relations of production in the function of
modes of production. 24 It could therefore be said that kinship classification articulates
the modes in which all kinds of goods - alimentary, human, religious, and cultural are produced, distributed and consumed among the members of society.25 To draw a
conclusion, we could say that “cultural values” or “shared meanings“ related to
kinship relationships, to which French cultural history and British cultural studies
refer, are, in these archaic types of society, in fact of vital importance for keeping
society together and for the articulation of the various modes of relations among their
members.
But can we generalise this conclusion also across other types of societies since,
historically speaking, this kind of approach can eventually only be valid for “primitive”
societies with no or only feebly articulated class-structure? To conclude, while
“cultural values” have an important predominant role in organizing the modes of
exchange among members in primitive societies, they lose their supremacy in the
proto-capitalist and capitalist societies. There, not “cultural values”, as in primitive
societies, but commodity exchange imposes itself as the dominant form of exchange,
able to determine all social relationships in modern societies.26 If commodity
23
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale, Paris, Plon, 1958.
Cf. Louis Althusser, “Su Lévi-Strauss”, published in: Su Feuerbach, Marco Vanzulli (ed.), Milano,
Mimesis althusseriana, 2003; necessarily consult also Marco Vanzulli’s preface.
25 Lévi-Strauss made an interesting contribution to the question why certain “cultural practices” as
body painting are very similar in different societies although it is hard to prove that there was any
cultural exchange between those societies. He proposed an interesting solution saying simply that
cultural practices are similar because they are similarly articulated by kinship systems or
classifications. And because they have the same purpose to serve, because drawings on skin were in
all societies a visualization of social relations, they could finally also take the same form and the same
appearance in various societies without actually deriving from any cultural contact.
26 Cf. Rastko Močnik, Theoretical Appendix: On the Notion of “Identitiy”, 2003, p. 19, manuscript; cf.
also same author, “Zgodovinski materializem pred vprašanjem ’umetnost in družba’”, published as
preface in: Arnold Hauser, Umetnost in družba, Ljubljana, DZS, 1980. Cf. also Lev Kreft, “Umetniško
delo v obdobju hegemonije blagovne forme”, Filozofski vestnik, Ljubljana, Vol. XXIV, No. 3, 2003.
24
14
exchange at that moment becomes capable to over-determine all other forms of
social relationships27 (and, at the same time, determines the emergence of a specific
and "relatively autonomous" sphere of culture), culture then becomes “redundant”. It
is expelled into the so-called “autonomous” sphere of culture, which is, to put it justly,
at the same time also a chance for its “emancipation”.28 When culture pulled itself
from the world and cleaned itself of the dust of physical work, it also castrated itself,
as Adorno would comment.29 Taking a look from this emancipated position toward its
exterior, i.e., toward the real material conditions of human existence, from where it
has been withdrawn, culture can articulate the outside reality only through burning
“guilt”. With these expressions, Adorno excellently anticipated the position of French
cultural history and British cultural studies: they renounced the outside reality seeing
it as ‘fatal’, while they retrenched themselves, together with their objects of research
styled as “cultural values”, from the rest of the social world.
As an alternative, I propose to decompose the research of culture into various topics
and to examine how these multiple objects of research make interferences with other
social spheres. In this case, we will not overemphasize or underestimate the meaning
of culture, but will take seriously the importance of its relative autonomy. We could
bring it back to its roots only through the mechanisms of ideology, which help us to
question our theoretical predispositions and our conceptions of society.
27
As we have shown in other texts, the public finance of the Renaissance city-states, the enormous
richness, accumulated in the hands of the state and originating in another form of exchange, called
“reciprocal exchange” by Marcel Mauss, was, at a certain historical moment, also subjected to the
commodity exchange. Public finances were ideologically presented as “reciprocal exchange”, but in
fact they were used for the enrichment of the already rich groups, since they were administrated so
that few received great repayments, many small ones, and most none. The majority of the population
lost more then they received in this special type of “reciprocal exchange”. And art was most probably
an important instrument in the appropriation of financial means in the hands of the lucky few: the elites
appropriated financial funds in exchange for the cultural goods they provided as public benefactors
and artistic mecenes.
28 In his book Democracy: Ancient and Modern (New Brunswick – New Jersey, Rutgers University
Press, 1972), Moses Finley demonstrated how true this statement is. In the last chapter of the book,
he compares Aristophanes and Sophocles who, both opposing contemporary politicians, had very
different destinies. Aristophanes, while making public mockeries of the state dignitaries at theatre
performances, was rewarded by the highest rewards and public admiration for his theatre pieces,
while Sophocles lost his life because of his public critique.
29 Theodor W. Adorno, Prismen. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft (Ital. translation: Prismi. Saggi sulla
critica della cultura, Torino, Giulio Einaudi, 1972, p. 8-9.
15