terry eagleton, ideology: an introduction

(xiv): the critique of ideology presumes that nobody is every wholly mystified--it rejects the 'external' standpoint of enlightenment rationality, but shares with the enlightenment this fundamental trust in the moderately rational nature of human beings.

chapter one

(5): ideology makes reference to systems of power, fundamentally

(9): a piece of language might be ideological in one context, but not in another--its a function of its relation to social context.

(16, 22, 26): ideology is bound up with an ulterior motive (the statement itself might be true or false)--but what makes it ideological is the idea that it is a "rhetorical act aimed at producing certain effects" (related, it seems, to his treatment of 'fictionality')

(18): for Althusser, ideology is a matter of the way in which we 'pre-reflectively' relate to social reality--how reality 'strikes us' in the form of spontaneous experiences. (shifting, eagleton says, from a cognitive to an affective theory of ideology)

(27): notion of 'enlightened false-consciousness'

(28-31): the six ways in which ideology can be defined, with a 'progressive sharpening of focus'

1. general production of ideas, beliefs, and values in social life (Stressing the social determination of thought)
2. conditions and life-experiences of a particular class
3. attends to the promotion of the interests of a given social group in the face of opposing interests
4. confining this last definition to the activities of a dominant social power (i.e., helping to 'unify' a social formation in order to secure the complicity of subordinates)
5. ideology signifies ideals and beliefs that distort and dissumulate contradictions in society, legitimating the interests of a ruling group
6. and finally, a conception of ideology that arises not from the activities of the cominant class but from the material structure of society as a whole. ('fetishism of commodities')

chapter two

(34): adamant, here, that ideology alone cannot explain passivity

(35-36): cohesion is achieved much more by economic than by ideological means (though he does recognize that one can bend the stick too far in the other direction)

(36): consciousness as a 'contradictory amalgam' of ideas culled from rulers and from practical experience in society

(42): in sum--thus far he has suggested three different possibilities, then:

1. material techniques much more than ideology enforce cohesion
2. system maintains itself not by imposing meaning, but by destroying it
3. there is a dominant ideology at work, but no one is gullible enough to believe it

(44): again, as earlier--falsity as a functional property (those ideas which legitimate shady interests, etc.)

(46-47): very useful critique of both the frankfurt school, and foucault--they foreclose the possibility of an emancipatory conciousness, even as their own critique depends on the viability of that position (for foucault, for example, if there is nothing beyond power, what is being regimented and disciplined?)

(45-61): six functions of ideology

1. unifying--forcing cohesion on a differentiated entity
2. action-oriented--must be translatable into a practical state, capable of furnishing adherents with motivations, etc.
   
3. rationalizing--rationalizing, expressing social interests in explanations that are logically consistent or ethically acceptable
   
4. legitimating--ruling power seeks to secure consent from its subjects
5. universalizing--values specific to a time and place become eternal values
   
6. naturalizing--ideology creates as tight a fit as possible between itself and reality, foreclosing critique; social reality is redefined by the ideology to become coextensive with itself.

(61): nothing wrong with universalisms, of course. the question is one of principles.

jorge larrain, "marxism and ideology"

(6): two grave errors, when you try and investigate the concept of "ideology" ahistorically

1. the relation of ideology to categories in capitalism is missed
2. ideology is elevated to the concept of ideology in general, which misses the way in which it evolves through historical periods [this is going to hinge on the notion of various forms of 'personal dependence' becoming 'objective dependence']

(7): it was only when the contradictions of capitalism became apparent that a critique of the one-sidedness of bourgeois thought became possible

(9): following an 'intermediate' path between Althusser/epistemological break, and those who treat Marx's writings as a complete whole. here there will be a division into three periods:

1. period where main theoretical paramters were set by Hegel and Feuerbach (early writings till 1844)
2. period where 'historical materialism' was constructed, and where the concept of ideology was first produced (1844 and Theses on Feuerbach/German Ideology-1857)
3. period where Marx begins detailed study of capitalist social relations (1858 and Marx's re-reading of Hegel's logic, Grundrisse)

PHASE ONE

(11-12): two inversions in Hegel

1. the Idea becomes the real, and material practice is made to follow from it
2. the State determines civil society, rather than civil society (and its attendant contradictions) determining the State

(13): key--Marx's critique of Feuerbach (and the abstracted understanding of man with which he works) involves an assault on the notion that 'philosophical critique' will suffice--this is where the notion of 'revolutionary practice' is born.

PHASE TWO

(16): Larrain against Althusser's understanding of the GI (according to A, Marx's conceives of ideology as 'pure illusion', here)

(18): Marx, Larrain saying, was asserting against 'idealism', but also against a vulgar 'materialism' (which said that 'consciousness is a 'passive reflection of external reality')

(21): here, there are three important elements of the context in which 'ideology' is developed, as a concept

1. it is part of a wider theory about the 'formation of ideas' (21-22)--that, insofar as 'social reality' is practice (men's 'conscious and sensuous activity by which they produce their material existence and the social relations), men and women come to know the world through practice. their representation of the world succeeds their making of it.
   
2. 'the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas (22)--this is a formulation about 'ideas', which can be related to the ruling class 'genetically' or via what's in their interests or others', even; but it doesn't apply to 'ideology', which necessarily serves the interests of the ruling class without necessarily being produced by them (it's produced by limited material practice, it seems).
   
3. ideology, unlike 'ideas' in general, is related to contradictions in a very specific and distinctive manner.

(21): key--there is a critical distinction here, between mundane material practice (a specific division of labour, in which the individual participates but nonetheless is subject to), and revolutionary practice (which aims at abolishing that 'objective power), with the implication that different ideas can emerge from the different kinds of practice.

(23): key--here there is a distinction between 'ideas' and 'ideology'--ideas are 'real or illusory' expression of practice. 'ideology', however, has to do with those ideas that express practice inadequately, due to the limitations of practice itself (as a result of limiteed material mode of activity'--as a result of the sensation of being ruled over by an objective power). [a more complete definition, we will see, incorporates the fact that 'ideology' occludes social contradictions]

(28): 'ideology' solves contradictions by hiding them -- the real resolution, of course, requires a resolution of 'material practice' [but this elides some of the dynamics of revolutionary practice, it would seem -- after all, how can one resolve 'material practice' without having rid oneself of the ruling 'ideology']

(29): the role of ideology is not defined by its class origin but by the objective concealment of contradictions

PHASE THREE

(32-34): here Marx, of course, proceeds from a specific analysis of the contradictions of capitalism to enumerate the contours of bourgeois political ideology (circulation as the source of exchange value, the wage form as the equivalent value of a whole working day, etc.--equality, freedom, bentham). four main ideas, in short

1. ideology as the conceptions of the active participants in economic relations--spontaneous consciousness, spontaneously reproduced
2. they reverse the essential pattern
3. not an illusion without any social basis
4. there is a possibility, here, of a 'non-ideological' consciousness [this, fundamentally, is the break with foucault--the belief in a 'revolutionary practice']

(37): ideology as appearences that correspond to real relations [but can't there be very many different 'ideologies' which correspond to real relations, and mask them]

(37): key, distinctions between capitalism and 'feudalism' --before, there were relations of personal dependence; now, objective dependence. ' in the former, then, relations of dependence were in no way hidden, rather they were rationalized (recourse to a transcendent sphere, what have you); in the latter, however, there is an objective concealment of dependence, under capitalism.

(39): four different forms of 'concealment'

1. denial of contradictions--clinging to some sense of 'unity'
   
2. misunderstanding of contradictions--Sismondi, who criticizes contradictions without understanding them
   
3. displacement of contradictions--displacing the real contradiction by reference to a different conflict (over machinery, for example)
   
4. dilutement of contradictions--'social democracy'

(43-45): five problems with the concept of ideology elaborated here

1. how is it possible to have an 'ideology' of the dominated classes? a revolutionary ideology?
2. how to define 'contradiction'/'inversion' more clearly? [Fields' conception of contradiction in the Slave-owning south, for example]
3. how do you understand the 'superstructure' of which 'ideology' is simply one part? [i.e., how do you understand all the other ideas that exist]
4. is there a vantage point that promises a critique that is not ideological?
   
5. ideology will disappear in the communist mode of production?
   

ideology and utopia, karl mannheim (1929)

(336):two distinct and separable meanings of the term 'ideology'

1. the particular-- when "we are sceptical of the ideas and representations advanced by our opponent"
2. the total-"the ideology of an age or of a concrete historico-social group..."

(337): some distinctions between the two

• particular calls into question specific assertions; total calls into question Weltanschauung
• particular implies, still, a shared thought-system (psychological); total denotes an opposite system of beliefs (noological, or theoretical)
• particular is pscyhological and individual, total more structural and functional (and social)

(338): critical--"...conditioned by the same social situation, they are subject to the same illusions. if we confine our observations to the mental processes which take place in the individual..., we shall never grasp in its totality the structure of the intellectual world belonging to a social group in a given historical situation. although this mental world as a whole could never come into existence without the experiences and productive responses of the different individuals, its inner structure is not to be found in a mere integration of these individual experiences. thd individual members of the working class, for instance, do not experience all the elements of an outlook which could be called the proletarian Weltanschaung..."

(338): "the aim of the analysis on this level is the recontstruction of the systematic theoretical basis underlying the single judgments of the individual."

(339): the problem of false consciousness--"compelled by the dialectical processes of thought, it is necessary to concentrate our attention with greater intensity upon the task of determining which of all the ideas current are really valid in a given situation..." [even as we have conceded, entirely, the premise that all ideas are socially and historically determined. the justification, he seems to be saying, will recall pragmatism]

(339): interesting--"an ethical attitude is invalid if it is oriented with reference to norms, with which action in a given historical setting, even with the best of intentions, cannot comply. it is invalid then when the unethical action of the individual can no longer be conceived as due to his own personal transgression, but must be attributed rather to the compulsion of an erroneously founded set of moral axioms... a theory then is wrong if in a given practical situation it uses concepts and categories which, if taken seriously, would prevent man from adjusting himself at that historical stage..." [notion of 'adjustment' seems particularly important, here--examples given include lending without interest]

(340): a further form of 'ideological distortion', he's arguing, come when one employs "ideology as a form of knowledge[which] is no longer adequate for comprehending the actual world..."

(340): important--but distinction between this kind of incongruity, and the incogruity of utopian ideology -- which is "oriented towards objects which do not exist in the actual situation... [and which] when they pass over into conduct, tend to shatter... the order of things prevailing at that time"

(341): utopias, of course, can get integrated into the establishment ideology, once purged of revolutionary implications [heaven]

(341-342): 'existence' as a 'concretely-operating order', for the sociologist

(342): very true--the importance of contradictory character of prevailing 'order of things' and attendant ideology--"every 'actually operating' order of life is at the same time enmehsed by conceptions which are to be designated as 'transcendent' or 'unreal'. part of this, he's arguing, is the fact that "living consistently... in a society which is not organized on the same principle is impossible."

(343): this is the key distinction between 'ideologies' and 'utopia'--the latter is committed to transformative political practice. and something revolutionary is invariably deemed utopian by the powers-that-be (always meant, then, "in the relative sense").

(344): "by calling everything utopian that goes beyond the present existing order, one sets at rest the anxiety that might arise from the relative utopias that are realizable in another order."

(344): "only in utopia and revolution is there true life, the institutional order is always only the evil residue which remains from ebbing utopias and revolutions. hence, the road of history leads from one topia over a utopia to the next topia..."

(345): key, though, that this not be abstractly formulated--"it is our intention not to establish purely abstractly...some sort of arbitrary relationship between existence and utopia, but rather if possible to do justice to the concrete fullness of the historical and social transformations of utopia in a given period."

(345): sounds quite orthodox--"the existing order gives birth to utopias which in turn break the bounds of the existing order, leaving it free to develop in the direction of the next order of existence." [only this denotes a never-ending process--'utopias are often only premature truths']

(346): well-put: "it is always the dominant group which is in full accord with the existing order that determines what is to be regarded as utopian, while the ascendant group which is in conflict with things as they are is the one that determines what is regarded as ideological." [caveat that same group/project can contain both utopian and ideological elements--bourgoisie and freedom]

(346): for historical study, realization is the criteria that determines what was ideology and what was utopia.