Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (3 page)

2. A camera obscura
.

The initial coiner of the term ‘ideology’, Antoine Destutt de Tracy, writing in the aftermath of the French Revolution, intended to create a proper branch of study concerned with ideas. He sought to establish ideals of thought and action on an empirically verifiable basis, from which both the criticism of ideas and a science of ideas would emerge. That enterprise was very much in line with the positivist movement in 19th-century France, which held out the
possibility of studying society with the precise tools characteristic of a natural science. Our post-positivist age does not accept that the range of human thought and imagination can be given the accuracy and permanence that these earlier codifiers of knowledge had anticipated. But one residue needs to be taken seriously. Destutt de Tracy’s intentions reflect the need that current scholars perceive for a professional and dedicated approach to the study of ideology. Having, then, paid homage to the originator of the word, and acknowledging the task ahead, we first proceed to the early and still influential developers of the product, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who took a very different line.

In
The German Ideology
, Marx and Engels reacted to the prevailing German cultural and philosophical fashions they had experienced. The spiritual and romantic nature of German idealist thought, they contended, was fuelled by erroneous conceptions. One of these attributed independent existence to ideas, thought, and consciousness when attempting to exchange illusory thought for correct thought. But in so doing, argued Marx and Engels, German philosophers merely fought against phrases rather than coming to terms with the real world. Philosophy thus concealed reality, and adopted the form of what Marx and Engels called an ideology. They maintained that ‘in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura’. By that analogy they meant that ideology was an inverted mirror-image of the material world, further distorted by the fact that the material world was itself subject to dehumanizing social relations under capitalism. The role of ideology was to smooth over those contradictions by making them appear as necessary, normal, and congruous. That way social unity could be maintained and enhanced. Ideology was a sublimation – in its various guises such as morality, religion, and metaphysics – of material life. In addition, ideology was disseminated by those who specialized in the mental activity of sublimation: priests offering ‘salvation’ were an early example of
that ‘emancipation’ from the real world. That dissemination could be an act of deliberate manipulation, but it could also – especially for Engels – be an unconscious, or self-deceptive, process. Ideology was one manifestation of the pernicious effects of the division of labour. In this case, the division of labour caused human thought to be abstracted from the material world, producing instead pure theory, or ethics, or philosophy.

Marx and Engels added to that view of ideology a further dimension, which was to be highly influential. They associated ideology and class, asserting that the ideas of the ruling class were the ruling ideas. Ideological illusions were an instrument in the hands of the rulers, through the state, and were employed to exercise control and domination; indeed, to ‘manufacture history’ according to their interests. Moreover, the filtering of interests through a container – ideology – permitted them, and ideology itself, to be represented as if they were truth-claims that possessed universal, rational validity. That representation assisted the wielders of ideology in forging the myth of a unified political community, through illusory laws, cultural direction, and ‘verbal masquerading’ – that is, the power over language.

The controllers of human conduct and thought even convinced the members of the subservient class – the proletariat – that the dominant bourgeois ideology was theirs as well. An exploited worker actually believed that it was a good idea to get up in the morning and work 14 hours for a pittance in her employer’s factory, because she had internalized the ideological view that such dehumanizing work was an inevitable part of the industrial order, that it was a free act on her part, that markets gave everyone an equal chance, and that earning one’s keep by renting out one’s labour to others was central to one’s sense of dignity. Ideology thus concentrated on external appearances, not on a real understanding of what was essential. The abnormal became normal through ideological sleight of hand and through fetishizing (bestowing a sacred and mystifying status on) commodities and the markets in
which they circulated; for example, people worshipped money rather than respecting the genuine productive processes that generated wealth. Here – a tendency evident in his later work, especially
Capital
– Marx focused on the actual capitalist practices from which ideology emanated, rather than on the distorted ideas of philosophers and ideologists. Understandably, a major mission of what later became known as Marxism was to unmask and demystify the dissimulative nature of ideology. The critical exposition of ideology would expose the false aspirations of its promoters, and install instead a set of wholesome social practices that provided the empirical basis of true social consciousness.

We can see a rather persuasive picture of ideology emerging from the Marxist approach. Ideology was the product of a number of basic, if unhealthy, causes. One was the need for simplified and easily marketable accounts of the world around us. A second was the desire of some individuals and groups for power and control over others. A third was a growing tendency to break up human activity into separate compartments – the division of labour – and to alienate thought and action from each other. Ideology reinforced all that, and it kept societies in a state of ignorance and suffering. One might justifiably conclude that Marxism accorded ideas considerable power, and so it did – to ideas that appeared in the form of ideology. But for Marx such concentrated power was wrong, as it blocked the possibility of human emancipation. All these features appear in a much more sophisticated manner in Marx’s own writings, but it is broadly in these forms that they have been subsequently replicated in vulgarized yet influential views of ideology.

Before lining up to praise or blame the Marxist theory of ideology, we need to ask ourselves: what has to hold for those arguments to make sense? First, they depend on the crucial distinction between true consciousness and distorted or false beliefs. In order to claim that our understanding of the (political) world is based on an illusion, we must be confident that non-illusory knowledge is
attainable. Marx believed that truth would emerge once distortion was removed; in other words, that true human and material relations were both a default position that was obscured by social and ideological distortions and a scientifically anticipated outcome of future social development. That truth could be conclusively excavated (it was certainly not discovered through revelation or intuition, in which Marx didn’t believe) was a non-negotiable assumption. For that very reason, as we shall see, Marx’s critics labelled this fundamental assertion itself an ideological belief, thus turning the tables on Marx. But the existence of social truths may not be as obvious as it seems. Some factual knowledge may appear to be evident – ‘I am looking at a group of people engaged in a protest meeting’ – but, as we have seen,
what
we come away knowing about that group will differ according to the interpretative map we use. There is a well-known phrase: ‘let’s judge the case on its merits’. But cases aren’t equipped with merits that jump out at us; we impose merits
on
the case, in line with the beliefs and values to which we already subscribe.

Second, and consequently, those arguments depend on the ephemeral nature of ideology. If ideology is a distortion, it will disappear once true social relations have been (re)introduced. If it is the product of an unnatural and alienating division between the material and the spiritual, it will disappear once the material roots of the spiritual are recognized. And if it consolidates a power relationship between ruling and ruled classes, it will disappear once such power relationships are transformed into a democratic sense of social community and equality. So ideology is dispensable; it is a pathological product of historical circumstances and it will wither away when they improve.

Third, the Marxist conception of ideology has contributed to a unitary understanding of ideology. If ideology is indeed an unfortunate smokescreen that covers up reality, the faster we dispose of it the better. In particular, there is no point in examining it for what it is, nor in distinguishing among different variants of
ideology. For many Marxists, though not for all, as we shall see, ideology is part of a ‘superstructure’ that has no intrinsic value. As a result, their approach to ideology has discouraged any interest in the nature and permutations of the concealing smokescreen. Marx’s quasi-messianic conviction that a socialist, undistorted society would prevail meant that present defects were worth deploring, not exploring. It is as if a student of political institutions decided that it was a waste of time to study the House of Commons because its debates exhibit inferior political practice: they display loutish behaviour, competitive antagonism, gross inefficiencies, and ridiculous seating arrangements. Instead, declares the scholar, let’s devote our intellectual efforts to predicting the development of a best-practice legislature, which can be defended and endorsed permanently.

In order to claim that political practices or ideas are distorted, we have to be certain that they possess undistorted forms. But even if we are convinced of the current ubiquity of such distortions, a student of politics could persuasively contend that these are interesting social phenomena, and they require analysis if we are to understand the nature of the political in existing societies. Once we plunge into the smokescreen, into the substance of ideology, we will find both commonalities and variations: a complex and rich world that awaits discovery. In short, a large number of concrete ideologies inhabit Marx’s abstract category of ‘ideology’, and their shared features provide immensely significant aids to making sense of the political world.

Fourth, another facet of the unitary character of Marxist ideology is that ideologies are part of a single, even total, account of the political world. They are the linchpin that holds together a seamless view of the world, papering over its internal contradictions. This image of coordinated totality prevailed for a long time in portrayals of ideology, contributing to its inclusive nature and to an insistence by some ideologists that they were infallible. We need however to be convinced that such monolithic views of the world not only exist,
but have persuasive force. In the absence of such persuasive force, physical coercion has all too often become necessary to hold ideology in place.

Fifth, the role of ideologists has been exaggerated. Although Marxist logic points to the social provenance of ideology, its source has frequently turned out to be much smaller than an entire class. The Marxist linking of ideology to power relations as well as to the manipulation of the masses has often resulted in the identification of a professional group of ideologues, and even in the detection of the impact of single individuals. For some scholars, ideologues are intellectuals with a dangerous sense of mission – namely, to change the world according to a specific absolute vision. This perspective entails a rather hierarchical view of the world. It also suggests that both the production and the dissemination of intellectual goods constitute a monopoly. The Marxist theory of class assists in supporting such views, though the intellectuals that figure in those theories sometimes act independently, less determined by their own material bases than Marxists assume. The association of ideology with such intellectuals has also contributed to the commonly held view that ideologies are a priori, abstract, and non-empirical. That view is widely believed by current politicians, by the press, and by quite a few scholars as well, especially in the Anglophone world, with its own myth of empiricism, and in the German-speaking world, still under the influence of the vocabulary employed by its countryman, Marx.

What, then, is still of value in the Marxist emphasis on unmasking ideology? Four things, perhaps. First, we have picked up from Marx the significance of social and historical circumstances in moulding political (and other) ideas. We accept as a truism that people are importantly the product of their environment, though there is still much debate on the relative weight of the environmental, the genetic, and the individual capacity for choice. Relieved of some of the Marxist baggage, ideas and ideologies are understood as the
product of groups. They are also part of the cultural milieu that shapes, and is shaped by, our activities.

Second, ideas matter. Marx may have seen the current domain of ideology as a harmful illusion, but even in that sphere the implication is that ideas are not merely rhetorical. If ideas appear not only as truths but in such commanding guises as an ideology, they need to be taken very seriously indeed, and accorded an even more central role than Marx himself had done.

Third, ideologies are endowed with crucial political functions. They order the social world, direct it towards certain activities, and legitimate or delegitimate its practices. Ideologies exercise power, at the very least by creating a framework within which decisions can be taken and make sense. That power doesn’t have to be exploitative or dehumanizing, but then only some anarchists would argue that power – even as an enabling phenomenon – can be dispensed with completely.

Fourth, the Marxist method has bequeathed something of importance even to non-Marxists. It is, simply, that what you see is not always what you get. If we wish to understand ideologies, we have to accept that they contain levels of meaning that are hidden from their consumers and, frequently, from their producers as well. The study of ideology therefore encompasses in large part – though certainly not entirely – the enterprise of decoding, of identifying structures, contexts, and motives that are not readily visible.