Annotations ¶
Ideas always arise in particular concrete historical locations which inflect the ideas in certain ways. The ideas arise in part because of the history. But having established the context, one needs to look at the internal coherence of the theory which is being elaborated and at the way in which it constitutes itself in response to the problematics which it defines. This is bound to involve a work between history and theory, rather than either the unfolding of a logically and conceptually clarified theoretical line of thinking or simply the deconstruction of theory into its historical conditions.
Political economy merely explains the laws of market society; utilitarianism, especially in its Benthamite form, provides a calculative ethic which enables people to decide what is good and bad in exactly the same way as they decide whether to pay the price of a particular commodity. Utilitarianism organises morality in the image of market exchange. Possessive individualism offers a conception of human nature that defends capitalism, not just as an economic system, but in terms of its correspondence to intrinsic human qualities and capabilities. It defines “Man” as intrinsically competitive and possessive. (Women were not included in the discourse, because it was thought that those who were carving out the world were men.) Hence, socialism and collectivism as well as the various organic conservatisms, all those rival ideologies, were doomed to fail, not just because they were not as modern and rationalist, but because they were not grounded in human nature. (That argument has not gone away!)
Williams identifies culture very closely with the way a sociohistorical experience is understood and defined. And the basis for a (cultural) community lies in the sharedness of those definitions of historical experiences. People locate themselves as belonging to a community because within it, some experiences are common and some of the ways in which they have been defined and understood are shared. How are they shared? Through the interactive communication between the members of that community. Consequently, all the means of communication—language and media in their broadest senses and not just the narrow sense of communication as the transmission of information (in which Williams is not interested)—provide the ways through which the individuals within a community, culture, or society exchange and refine their shared meanings and in which they collectively and socially define what it is they are going through.
An adequate account of the whole culture of the modern world cannot be given without reference to the traces of residual ideas and practices which are appropriated into an enormous variety of social struggles. It is philistinism on the part of Marxist scholars to dismiss the social effects of residual cultures in contemporary culture and society. Why is it that the critique of capitalism has always drawn on the supposed remembrances of precapitalist cultural forms as well as on the explicit dreams of postcapitalist forms? We all know the power and the appeal of such residual ideas as we are about to rush off to the countryside, a countryside that doesn’t exist, a mythical countryside. It was constructed in newspapers, literature, and music, most of it generated and produced in the towns. The point is that these images from the past are recuperated into the present, where they work again. We work on and with them; we even build on bits of them in order to envisage what we cannot know, what we have no image for. When you try to imagine what tomorrow is going to be like, you can only draw on the legacy of the past.
Le Guin’s return to nature
Those who are in the capitalist class have a set of material interests which are in an antagonistic relation to the class which is exploited and has only its labour to sell. Outlooks, worldviews, or ideologies tend to follow and cluster around the social interests of these two antagonistic groups. Those who do not live and experience the struggle between the classes as it is defined at the structural level, who don’t live it out exactly as determined by their position within the class relations, are living in false consciousness. That is to say, there is an objective ideology or set of ideological positions which you would expect classes (and individuals) to have as a consequence of their class positioning. When they don’t have it, it must be because they don’t recognise their true interests.
There are many objections to notions of false consciousness, but perhaps the most telling is not theoretical but political. I wonder how it is that all the people I know are absolutely convinced that they are not in false consciousness, but can tell at the drop of a hat that everybody else is.
I have never understood how anyone can advance in the field of political organisation and struggle by ascribing an absolute distinction between those who can see through transparent surfaces, through the complexity of social relations, to the base (and who consequently act according to the real structure) and the vast numbers of people throughout the history of the world who are imprisoned, who are judgmental dopes, and who just can’t tell what things are. They live their lives from day to day; they get their wages and salaries; they buy things; they eat; they raise families; they travel about; and in all this they just can’t see reality, their own interests, or what they ought to think and do. Indeed, I have always undertaken to move from the opposite position, assuming that all ideologies which have ever organised men and women organically have something true about them. They have truth that people recognise; they really allow us to grasp and define what our experience is. Of course they may not tell us the full truth: They may accentuate certain things at the expense of others; they may be partial in the understanding which they give. But they are not false in the sense of being simply lies, misrepresentations, or misrecognitions. Consequently, false consciousness is not an adequate theorisation of the problem of class positioning and class ideologies.
It really defeats Marxism to take Marx as a prophet, and his writing as the equivalent of Capitalism’s Almanac where you can look up what will happen tomorrow. If you invest the last vestige of your faith in Marx, and he makes a wrong prophecy, that can only destroy Marxism for you; you have made a commitment that Marx did not invite. He was a very great thinker who, like all great thinkers, made mistakes. He had to go back over The Communist Manifesto, not to refute it but to analyse the actual turn of events that he had come so very close to predicting.
What is ideology but, precisely, this work of fixing meaning through establishing, by selection and combination, a chain of equivalences?
What is the function of ideology? It is to reproduce the social relations of production. The social relations of production are necessary to the material existence of any social formation or any mode of production. But the elements or the agents of a mode of production, especially with respect to the critical factor of their labour, have themselves to be continually produced and reproduced. Althusser argues that increasingly in capitalist social formations, labour is not reproduced inside the social relations of production themselves, but outside of them. Of course, he does not mean biologically or technically reproduced only; he means socially and culturally as well. It is produced in the domain of the superstructures: in institutions like the family and church. It requires cultural institutions such as the media, trade unions, political parties, et cetera, which are not directly linked with production as such but which have the crucial function of “cultivating” labour of a certain moral and cultural kind—that which the modern capitalist mode of production requires. Schools, universities, training boards, and research centres reproduce the technical competence of the labour required by advanced systems of capitalist production. But Althusser reminds us that a technically competent but politically insubordinate labour force is no labour force at all for capital. Therefore, the more important task is cultivating that kind of labour which is able and willing, morally and politically, to be subordinated to the discipline, the logic, the culture, and compulsions of the economic mode of production of capitalist development, at whatever state it has arrived; that is, labour which can be subjected to the dominant system ad infinitum. Consequently, what ideology does, through the various ideological apparatuses, is to reproduce the social relations of production in this larger sense. That is Althusser’s first formulation.
Ideologies are the frameworks of thinking and calculation about the world—the “ideas” with which people figure out how the social world works, what their place is in it, and what they ought to do.
After all, in democratic societies, it is not an illusion of freedom to say that we cannot adequately explain the structured biases of the media in terms of their being instructed by the State precisely what to print or allow on television. But precisely how is it that such large numbers of journalists, consulting only their “freedom” to publish and be damned, do tend to reproduce, quite spontaneously, without compulsion, again and again, accounts of the world constructed within fundamentally the same ideological categories? How is it that they are driven, again and again, to such a limited repertoire within the ideological field? Even journalists who write within the muckraking tradition often seem to be inscribed by an ideology to which they do not consciously commit themselves and, which instead, “writes them.”
ideologies as, to paraphrase, systems of representation—composed of concepts, ideas, myths, or images—in which men and women (my addition) live “their imaginary relations to the real conditions of existence.”
the systems of representation in which men and women live. Althusser puts inverted commas around “live,” because he means, not blind biological or genetic life, but the life of experiencing, within culture, meaning, and representation. It is not possible to bring ideology to an end and simply live the real. We always need systems through which we represent what the real is to ourselves and to others. That’s the first important point about “live.” The second important point about “live” is that we ought to understand it broadly. By “live” he means that men and women use a variety of systems of representation to experience, interpret, and “make sense of” the conditions of their existence. It follows that ideology can always define the same so-called object or objective condition in the real world differently. There is “no necessary correspondence” between the conditions of a social relation or practice and the number of different ways it can be represented. It does not follow that, as the neo-Kantians in discourse theory have assumed, that because we cannot know or experience a social relation except “within ideology,” therefore it has no existence independent of the machinery of representation: a point already well clarified by Marx (1973) in the 1857 “Introduction” but woefully misinterpreted by Althusser himself.
Perhaps the most subversive implication of the term “live” is that it connotes the domain of experience. It is in and through the systems of representation of culture that we “experience” the world: Experience is the product of our codes of intelligibility, our schemas of interpretation. Consequently, there is no experiencing outside of the categories of representation or ideology. The notion that our heads are full of false ideas which can, however, be totally dispersed when we throw ourselves open to “the real” as a moment of the absolute authentication, is probably the most ideological conception of all. This is exactly the moment of “recognition” when the fact that meaning depends on the intervention of systems of representation disappears and we seem secure within the naturalistic attitude. It is a moment of extreme ideological closure. Here we are most under the sway of the highly ideological structures of common sense, the regime of the “taken for granted.” The point at which we lose sight of fact that sense is a production of our systems of representation is the point at which we fall, not into Nature but into the naturalistic illusion: the height (or depth) of ideology. Consequently, when we contrast ideology to experience, or illusion to authentic truth, we are failing to recognise that there is no way of experiencing the “real relations” of a particular society outside of its cultural and ideological categories. That is not to say that all knowledge is simply the product of our will to power; there may be some ideological categories which give us a more adequate or more profound knowledge of particular relations than others.
The so-called unity of a discourse is really the articulation of different, distinct elements which can be rearticulated in different ways because they have no necessary “belongingness.” The “unity” which matters is a linkage between that articulated discourse and the social forces with which it can, under certain historical conditions, but need not necessarily, be connected. Thus, a theory of articulation is both a way of understanding how ideological elements come, under certain conditions, to cohere together within a discourse, and a way of asking how they do or do not become articulated, at specific conjunctures, to certain political subjects. Let me put that the other way: The theory of articulation asks how an ideology discovers its subject rather than how the subject thinks the necessary and inevitable thoughts which belong to it; it enables us to think how an ideology empowers people, enables them to begin to make some sense or intelligibility of their historical situation, without reducing those forms of intelligibility to their socioeconomic or class location or social position.
The Caribbean system was organised through the finely graded classification systems of the colonial discourses of race, arranged on an ascending scale up to the ultimate “white” term—the latter always out of reach, the impossible, absent term, whose absent presence structured the whole chain. In the bitter struggle for place and position which characterises dependent societies, every notch on the scale mattered profoundly. The English system, by contrast, was organised around a simpler binary dichotomy, more appropriate to the colonising order: “white/not white.” Meaning is not a transparent reflection of the world in language but arises through the differences between the terms and categories, the systems of reference, which classify out the world and allow it to be in this way appropriated into social thought, common sense.
Contrary to the emphasis of Althusser’s argument, ideology does not therefore only have the function of “reproducing the social relations of production.” Ideology also sets limits to the degree to which a society can easily, smoothly, and functionally reproduce itself. The notion that the ideologies are always-already inscribed does not allow us to think about the shifts of accentuation in language and ideology, which is a constant, unending process—what Volosinov (1973) called the “multiaccentuality of the ideological sign” of the “class struggle in language.”
The functioning of the capitalist mode frequently requires that no fractions of the capitalist class are paid off; it often requires the power of the State to impose the terms of concession on capital as the price for its continued existence. So the idea that you can undo and ignore all the complexities of economic, class, political, social, and cultural relations and struggles, simply by looking for someone who profited financially from a particular event, merely undercuts the realities of the situation; it only appears to be materialist and scientific. The notion that one can understand history as a series of rip-offs, by various fractions of the capitalist class, of various fractions of the working class, receives only scorn from Gramsci; it has nothing to do with the processes by which a mode of production reproduces itself.
The State is a new kind of structuring force which often interposes itself between the direct play of economic or class forces and the relationships of culture. Consequently, in advanced democratic capitalist societies, the domains of culture and ideology have to be understood as much in relation to the State as to the mode of production. The State is frequently what Gramsci would call the instance which organises the terrain of civil society. It is the point where the rule of an economic class is converted into political power; it is where it becomes centralised and condensed, invested with the power and authority of the State itself.
Moreover, the State is frequently the primary agency through which cultural relations are organised and reorganised. One need only think of the relations between the ideological fields of public or popular opinion and the institutions of civil society—newspapers, the mass media, educational institutions, and the church—in terms of access both to the technology and to the means of the formation of people’s identities, to realise that it is the State which regulates many of the forms in which cultural and ideological production take place. Gramsci’s recognition of the importance of the State’s regulatory function—as the agent of the regulation of social relations, as the instance of law and of rule—is a crucial insight which prior to Gramsci was not a part of Marxism’s common vocabulary for thinking about the relationship between culture, ideology, and other domains of social practices.
Gramsci adopts what, at first, may seem a fairly traditional definition of ideology, by beginning with “any conception of the world, any philosophy which has become a cultural movement, a ‘religion,’ a ‘faith,’ any that has produced a form of practical activity or will in which the philosophy is contained as an implicit theoretical ‘premiss’ ” [sic]. “One might say,” he adds, “ ‘ideology’ here, but on condition that the word is used in its highest sense of a conception of the world that is implicitly manifest in art, in law, in economic activity and in all manifestations of individual and collective life” (328). This is followed by a clear statement of the problem ideology addresses or its basic function: “that of preserving the ideological unity of the entire social bloc which that ideology serves to cement and unify” (328). However, even this definition is not as simple as it looks, for it makes the essential link between the philosophical nucleus or premise at the centre of any distinctive ideology or conception of the world, and the necessary elaboration of that conception into a practical and popular form of consciousness, which affects the broad masses of society in the form of a cultural movement, political belief, faith, or religion. Gramsci is never only concerned with the philosophical core of an ideology; he always addresses organic ideologies, which “organise human masses, and create the terrain on which men move, acquire consciousness of their position, struggle, etc.” (377).
Every philosophical current leaves behind a sedimentation of “common sense”: this is the document of its historical effectiveness. Common sense is not rigid and immobile but is continually transforming itself, enriching itself with scientific ideas and with philosophical opinions which have entered ordinary life.… “Common sense” creates the folklore of the future, that is as a relatively rigid phase of popular knowledge at a given place and time. (326n5)
It is this concern with popular thought which distinguishes Gramsci’s treatment of ideology. Thus, he insists that everyone is a philosopher or an intellectual insofar as they think, since all thought, action, and language is reflexive, contains a conscious line of moral conduct, and thus sustains a particular conception of the world (although not everyone has the specialised function of “the intellectual”).
What matters is the criticism to which such an ideological complex is subjected.… This criticism makes possible a process of differentiation and change in the relative weight that the elements of the old ideologies used to possess. What was previously secondary and subordinate … becomes the nucleus of a new ideological and theoretical complex. The old collective will dissolves into its contradictory elements since the subordinate ones develop socially. (195)
Hegemony entails the formation of a bloc, not the appearance of a class. It is precisely the establishment of the ascendency of a particular historical bloc or formation over the society as a whole that constitutes hegemony, and this can only be accomplished if that bloc is able to generalise the interests and the goals of a particular group so that they come to command something like popular recognition and consent. The political project of rule in that sense has been changed completely by Gramsci’s terminology and concepts. Many political formations have established rule without the capacity to establish hegemony. Only hegemony enables the leading bloc to constitute a set of historical tasks for the society as a whole, to begin to make a variety of different social groups and institutions conform to and cooperate with that particular task. Sometimes it is the overcoming of a particular crisis; sometimes it is the setting of a new goal for the social formation, having the society undertake some new historical venture. Hegemony thus involves the way in which political forces are able to win or mobilise popular support for historic tasks.
Hegemony does not obliterate the difference between those who rule and those who do not. It does not erase the line separating the subordinate classes and those who are in the dominant position. On the contrary, it precisely allows for the space in which subordinate and excluded peoples develop political practices and social spaces of their own. Hegemony does not mean that they have to be driven out of existence or brutalised into acquiescence. They can maintain their own space as long as they are constantly contained within the horizon of political practices and ideological systems of representation which place them always in the subordinate position. It is perfectly compatible with a moment of hegemony to have a substantial area of working-class life, organisations, and institutions. It is only necessary to contain the forms of class consciousness and struggle that emerge around the ideological distinction between us and them. The position of a subordinate group—“We are of course of a different class. We don’t belong up there. We have our own spaces. Come down to our communities, come down to our clubs, come down to working-class culture. See us in our own space.”—can perfectly well be a subordinated space over which hegemony is exercised. Subordination remains alive, as real social practices, political spaces, and genuine institutions that allow a class to elaborate its life always do so in a language spoken by others, always in a political space defined by others. That is the way in which the hegemony of one group is established over another. Hegemony is about leadership and not only about domination.
The moments of coercion and consent are always complementary, interwoven, and interdependent, rather than separated elements. Most systems of exploitation are maintained by the double modalities of coercion and consent; they are both always present. Coercion functions as what Gramsci called “the support system,” even when power is functioning principally through consensual modes. But we must also recognise that there are important shifts in the tempo or rhythm by which societies structured in dominance maintain and reproduce their dominance. Hegemony points, not to the overthrow of one modality in favor of the other, but to the movement from the coercive to the consensual pole
As the consensual becomes more difficult to sustain, as the material conditions which allow consensual mechanisms to operate become more fragile and increasingly contested, one finds the coercive elements of the State and social institutions playing an increasingly important role in maintaining the mode of domination. That is the moment in which the law, the practices of the “policing of society,” and authoritarian discourses become more pronounced in their capacities to discipline and regulate the society.
Anybody who wants to command the space of common sense, or popular consciousness, and practical reasoning has to pay attention to the domain of the moral, since it is the language within which vast numbers of people actually set about their political calculations. The Left has rarely talked about that space in which the difference between the “good” and the “bad” is defined; it has rarely attempted to establish the language of a socialist morality. Consequently, it is left entirely in the keeping of religious and moral entrepreneurs, of the churches and the moral majority. For Gramsci, failing to recognise the importance of giving people the capacity to make the necessary calculations—in their own idioms, languages, and everyday life—of moral judgments (as well as of social, political, and intellectual ones) simply means that a particular political force (e.g., the Left) has abstained from engaging on a front where it ought to be present. Consequently, the subordination of the cultural field in the effort to construct a hegemonic politics—the notion that it is merely a matter of whim whether you enter into it, that it is someplace that you can get into or not as you like—would be ludicrous.
Thatcherism understands that hegemony requires you to block out the spaces and to define the new reference points for the entire social landscape. It has the capacity to operate hegemonically, at one and the same time, in the most advanced theoretical language and in the idioms of ordinary language.
Culture is not, and can never be, outside of the structuring field of the central contradictions that give shape, pattern, and configuration to a social formation, that is, contradictions around class, ethnicity, and gender. It is not outside of them, but it is not reducible to them.
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