Ideology

Ideology
So influential has the concept of ideology been within cultural studies that
the whole field was once dubbed ‘ideological studies’. Of course, the notion of
ideology has a long history and comes in various shapes and sizes. However, from
a cultural studies perspective, it has been the Marxist variants of the concept that
have formed the core usage and the centre of debate regarding its validity.

The concern of contemporary Western Marxism with the concept of ideology is
rooted in the failure of proletarian revolutions to materialize and the inadequacy
of historical materialism in relation to questions of subjectivity, meaning and
cultural politics. Put simply, the concern with ideology began as an exploration into
why capitalism, which was held to be an exploitative system of economic and social
relations, was not being overthrown by working class revolution. In particular, the
question asked was whether the working class suffered from ‘false consciousness’,
that is, a mistakenly bourgeois world-view which served the interest of the capitalist
class. There are two aspects of Marx’s writing that might be grounds for pursuing
such a line of thought.

First, Marx argues that the dominant ideas in any society are the ideas of the
ruling class. Second, he suggests that what we perceive to be the true character of
social relations within capitalism are in actuality the mystifications of the market.
That is, the appearance of market relations of equality obscures the deep structures
of exploitation. Here ideology has a double-character, both of which function to
legitimate the sectional interests of powerful classes. Namely, (a) ideas as coherent
statements about the world that maintain the dominance of capitalism and (b)
world-views which are the systematic outcome of the structures of capitalism which
lead us to inadequate understandings of the social world.

The most long-lasting and authoritative Marxist account of ideology in the
context of cultural studies has come from the writings of Gramsci that became
especially influential within cultural studies during the late 1970s. For Gramsci
ideology is grasped as ideas, meanings and practices which, while they purport to
be universal truths, are maps of meaning that support the power of particular social
classes. Here, ideology is not separate from the practical activities of life but provides
people with rules of practical conduct and moral behaviour rooted in day-to-day
conditions. Ideology is understood to be both lived experience and a body of
systematic ideas whose role is to organize and bind together a bloc of diverse social
elements, to act as social cement, in the formation of hegemonic and counterhegemonic
blocs. Though ideology can take the form of a coherent set of ideas it
more often appears as the fragmented meanings of common sense inherent in a
variety of representations. Within this paradigm common sense and popular culture
become the crucial sites of ideological conflict.
When the concept of ideology is read as power/knowledge then it suggests
structures of signification that constitute social relations in and through power. If
meaning is fluid – a question of difference and deferral – then ideology can be
understood as the attempt to fix meaning for specific purposes. Ideologies are then
grasped as discourses that give meaning to material objects and social practices; they
define and produce the acceptable and intelligible way of understanding the world
while excluding other ways of reasoning as unintelligible and unjustifiable.
Ideologies are thus about binding and justification rather than being concerned
with truth, falsity and objective interests. They are the ‘world-views’ of any social
group that both constitute them as a group and justify their actions.

(Adapted from The SAGE Dictionary of Cultural Studies, by Chris Brown)