We now relate the arguments in the preceding section to the question of Ideologiekritik. A useful starting point is the critical appropriation and reinterpretation of The German Ideology, a locus classicus of this practice, proposed by the feminist sociologist and proponent of standpoint theory (to include class, race and gender), Dorothy E. Smith. She writes:
Marx’s use of the concept of ideology in The German Ideology is incidental to a sustained critique of how those he described as the German ideologists think and reason about society and history. This critique is not simply of an idealist theory that represents society and history as determined by consciousness but of methods of reasoning that treat concepts, even of those of political economy, as determinants. His view of how consciousness is determined historically by our social being does not envisage some kind of mechanical transfer from ‘eco-nomic structure’ or ‘material situation’ to consciousness. Rather, he works with an epistemology that takes the concepts foundational to political economy as expressions or reflections of the social relations of a mode of production. The difference between ideology and science is the difference between treating those concepts as the primitives of theory and treating them as sites for exploring the social relations that are expressed in them. Thus the historical, rather than further undermining claims to knowledge, provides both the conditions under which knowledge is possible and its limitations. (Smith 2004: 446)
In short, Marx’s critique of ideology is not a critique of popular false consciousness or of ideological manipulation by the ruling class. Joe McCarney (1980) offers a useful overview of explicit uses of the stem
‘ideol*’ in Marx’s work during his writing career. He records that, in line with its etymology (ideology 5 science of ideas, their formation and effects), Marx essentially connects ‘ideological’ to products of conscious-ness: conceptions, ideas, theories, postulates, systems, and their linguis-tic expressions (e.g. formulas, names, phrases, manifestoes). McCarney reports that:
Between Scylla and Charybdis 169
● Marx rarely uses the bare substantive ‘ideology’ on its own, it is more common to find it with a qualifier, e.g., republican, Hegelian, political, German; or, ideology of the bourgeoisie, of the political economist.
● Also common are adjectival uses in which something has an ideological character, for example, expressions, forms, phrases, conceptions, contempt, theory, standpoint, reflex, echo, nonsense, distortion, method, etc.
● Marx also refers to ideologists, ideological representatives, ideological cretins, ideological classes (e.g., government officials, priests, lawyers, soldiers, etc.). (McCarney 1980: 3–4)
This analysis suggests a distinction between (1) sense and meaning systems as a way of going on in the world and (2) their ideological effects. This does not make the former ‘neutral’ (they always contain biases), but nor does it entail that such biases are always and everywhere ‘ideological’, that is, inevitably related to power and domination. Indeed, McCarney notes that Marx typically uses the term in the context of motivated practices and not in general discussions of language, forms of thought, consciousness and so forth (ibid.: 10–11). While this holds for explicit references to the ideological, we should note that the most powerful ideological effects may not stem from immediate conscious action: this is because they have been inscribed and sedimented in signification (e.g. in the form of fetishism, the taken- for- grantedness of the foundational categories of the capitalist mode of production and so forth).
Consistent with the second and third of McCarney’s findings, Smith (2004) notes that The German Ideology critiques German philosophers rather than the illusions of everyday lived experience. Marx and Engels dissected the manner in which named intellectuals take the organizing cat-egories of the capitalist mode of production and bourgeois society as the primitive terms of theories about these social relations and thereby natu-ralize features that are actually historically specific moments of specific social forms and practices. In short, regarding these categories, ideologists
‘treat them as given and build theory on the categories, ignoring the social relations in which they arise’ (Smith 2004: 455). In contrast, for Smith, science ‘explores the actual social relations expressed in the concepts and categories on which ideology builds’ (ibid.: 454). Such a sharp distinction between ideology and science is problematic from a CPE perspective, espe-cially as scientific (and not just ideological) practices are soespe-cially embed-ded. But scientific practices do produce knowledge in different ways and the overall point is valuable.
Needless to say, this critique is also relevant to many contemporary economic theories, state theories and work in international relations. For example, Mark Rupert, who works within the neo- Gramscian ‘Italian School’ tradition, notes:
170 Towards a cultural political economy
Both the system of sovereign states and the global division of labour – taken as ontologically primitive units by neorealism and world- system theory, respec-tively, – may instead be understood as aspects of the historically specific social organisation of productive activity under capitalism, as embodying relations of alienation, and as potentially transcendable. (Rupert 1993: 83)
Generalizing these remarks, a CPE approach interprets orders of dis-course and discursive practices (the second and third semiotic categories in Table 4.1) as aspects of specific institutional orders and more or less instituted social practices respectively. At stake in ideological critique in these contexts are the sources and mechanisms that ‘bias’ lived experi-ence and imaginaries towards specific identities and their changing ideal and/or material interests in specific conjunctures. Some indications of the analytical differences between imaginaries and ideologies are presented in Table 4.2. The first column presents imaginaries in terms of relatively simple variation; the second suggests how some of this variation may have ideological significance.
The ‘raw material’ of ideology is found in meaning systems, social imaginaries and lived experience. Thus a CPE- based critique of ideol-ogy would involve four main steps: (1) recognize the role of semiosis as a meaning pool in complexity reduction; (2) identify social imaginaries, that is, specific clusters of meaning (or semiotic) systems, and describe their form and content; (3) analyse their contingent articulation and function-ing in securfunction-ing the conditions for domination servfunction-ing particular interests;
and (4) distinguish between cases where these effects are motivated and/
or where they are effects of sedimented meaning. Meaning systems and Table 4.2 Imaginary versus ideology
Imaginary Ideology
Not ‘true’ or ‘false’ but may be more or less adequate basis for ‘going on’ in the world
Ideology is linked to ‘truth regimes’
related to specific ideal and material interests
Can lead to learning based on actors successive experiences (Erlebnis Erfahrung)
Ideology frames and limits Erlebnis (lived experience) and scope for Erfahrung (learning)
Alternative imaginaries are based on different entry- points and standpoints
Alternative ideologies privilege some entry- points and standpoints This opens space for varying degrees
of self- reflexion
Ideologies may be promoted intentionally and become part of common sense
Between Scylla and Charybdis 171 social imaginaries have a central role in struggles over exploitation and
domination. This goes beyond deliberate strategies to capture ‘hearts and minds’ – a common way of describing struggles for hegemony. It is also a matter of the ideological assumptions inscribed in language and other forms of signification even before such a strategy is pursued.
Thus we must ask how basic categories and general social imaginaries come to more or less durably shape, dominate or hegemonize the world.
One aspect is the extent and manner of links to ‘lived experience’, that is, how actors experience and understand their world(s) as real and meaning-ful seen from one or more subject positions and standpoints, and also how they empathize with others. Lived experience never reflects directly an extra- semiotic reality but involves making based on the meaning-ful pre- interpretation of the natural- cum- social world. Lived experience may be sedimented but its form is not pre- given and this creates space for learning. Lived experience is open to dislocation, contestation, repolitici-zation and struggle to restore, alter or overturn meaning systems, includ-ing those involved in diverse social imaginaries (on lived experience and learning, see Chapter 11).
Social imaginaries are not as unified as Charles Taylor (2004) and Cornelius Castoriadis (1987), among others, have suggested. This is, of course, a key point for Gramsci and the Bakhtin Circle, with their emphasis on the polyvocal, multi- accentual, dialogic nature of language and signification (see Chapter 3). Any unity is contingent and unstable, and this holds, a fortiori, for the ensemble of social imaginaries. Social forces try to make one or another imaginary the hegemonic or domi-nant ‘frame’ in particular contexts and/or to promote complementary or opposed imaginaries. Success may lead to a historical bloc, in which, to paraphrase Gramsci, ‘material forces are the content and imaginaries are the form’. Such struggles occur through semiosis, structuration, particular technologies and specific agents.
Where a meaning system or social imaginary encompasses a wide range of social activities, institutional orders and the lifeworld, it can become sedimented and have correspondingly wide- ranging effects. Charles Taylor defined a social imaginary as follows: ‘the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations’ (2004: 23). He expresses the notion of sedimentation (which he does not use) in terms of becoming ‘so self- evident to us that we have trouble seeing it as one possible conception among others’: it is ‘the only . . . one that makes sense’ (ibid.: 2). Of course, it is not only at the level of social formations that this sedimentation occurs. It occurs at all levels,
172 Towards a cultural political economy
from everyday lived experience through specific organizational ‘ideolo-gies’ and institutional outlooks to the codes and programmes of systems and dominant principles of societalization. The multitude of sites where this occurs creates a heteroglossic field in which ideological effects can be contested.
Only when the analysis reaches steps three and four could one demon-strate that specific sense- and meaning- making systems operate to legiti-mize the orders of discourse, social forms and social practices associated with particular hegemonic and/or dominant power relations. As such, the ideological process refers to the contribution of discourses to the contingent reproduction of power relations, especially where this involves hegemony (political, intellectual, moral and self- leadership). Whether a particular cultural ensemble has an ‘ideological’ moment depends on the form of (hegemonic) domination at stake: this could be capitalist, patri-archal, heteronormative, ‘racial’, national, regional and so forth. In this sense, a discourse could be ideological in regard to capitalism but non- ideological in relation to patriarchy (or, of course, vice versa). In short, Ideologiekritik requires an entry- point and a standpoint and must also be related to specific conjunctures rather than conducted in abstracto. In this sense, ideology is a contingent feature of culture and discourse that gets naturalized articulated, selected and sedimented in the (re)making of social relations.