Ideology

1
Ideology Society

• Marxist Tradition and Jameson

2
Outline

• Starting Questions
• Central Debates in Marxism after Marx
• Althusser on Ideology
• Jameson on Interpretation

3
Starting Questions

• I. Basics
• What are the central issues of debate engaged by
  both Althusser and Jameson?
• What is ideology as it is defined by Althusser?
• What are Jamesons views of Marxist
  interpretation?
• How does Althusser revise Marxist tradition by
  connecting it with structuralism and
  psychoanalysis?
• How does Jameson engage Bakhtin and structuralism
  in his theory of interpretation?
• II. ???
• What makes Bakhtin and Foucault related to
  Marxism, and what separates the two from the
  latter?
• How do Bakhtin, Foucault and Althusser describe
  society or social formation differently?
• How is discourse or power defined by Foucault
  similar to or different from ideology as
  Althusser defines it?

4
After Marx History

• Vulgar Marxism
• Leninism and the Second International
• simplification and indoctrination of Marx (e.g.
  ideology false consciousness)
• Zhdanovism (Reflectionism) revolution
  (Trotskyism)
• Stalinism
• Russian Formalism (Mikhail Bakhtin )
• 2. Western Marxism (e.g. Frankfurt School)
• 3. Poststructuralist (scientific) turnAlthusser,
  (? T. Eagleton)
• 4. American (F. Jameson) and British Marxism (R.
  Williams and T. Eagleton)
• 5. Post-Marxist (E. Laclau and C Mouffe)against
  its totalizing schema

5
After Marx Historical Turning Points

• October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution German
  Ideology published in 1920s.? Stalinism party
  proletariat dogmatization of Marx
• ? Western Marxism
• May 1968(// civil rights movements in the States)
  ?Traditional Marxism cannot account for this new
  social formation, or cultural revolution.
• ? Western Marxism gets to dominate as well as be
  transformed
• ? Foucaults turn (from structuralist or
  discourse approach) to power and domination.

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After Marx Central Issues for Debate

• Determinism, economic determinism
• Reflectionism (1) social homology (2) literature
  reflecting society and serving Communist causes.
  (tendentious or not)
• Base and Super Structure Literature/Culture and
  society (and the role of Marxist criticism)
• Definitions of class, exploitation and
  capitalism, possibilities of revolution (?
  cultural revolution)
• Definitions of ideology negative or positive,
  its influence on human subjects and
  interrelations with discourse.

7
After Marx Central Debates (2)

• Voluntarism or humanism
• critical theory rejects the base-superstructure
  metaphor in favor of a less well-defined
  totality.
• e.g. Lukacs, The Frankfurt school ? Raymond
  Williams, etc.

• Determinism
• Scientific Marxism more economistic
• e.g. Althusser, New Left Review

• (Alvin Gouldner The Two Marxisms)

The persistent the dialectics (in both action
and thinking). Engels Natural Dialectics ????
????,????, ???????,?????.
8
Western Marxism

• reacted against Leninism
• Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci(1891-1937, the
  Frankfurt School in Germany and the existential
  Marxists in France after World War II.
• Supplement classical Marxism with existentialism
  or psychoanalysis.
• Shifts the attention of critical theory away from
  the means and relations of production toward
  issues of everyday life and culture.
• (source Mark Poster http//www.humanities.uci.edu
  /mposter/books/)

9
Ideology different views

• Engels ideology false consciousness and
  ignorance
• Lenin bourgeois vs. socialist ideology
• Bakhtin denies the distinction between the
  intrinsic and the extrinsic Both consciousness
  and ideology are semiotic, whether in the form of
  "inner speech" or in the process of verbal
  interaction with others, or in mediated forms
  like writing and art. 
• Gramsci "historically organic ideologies
  repressive, arbitrary ideology
• Althusser has material base constitute
  subjectivities and their imaginary relations with
  society to ensure the power of the dominant group

10
Ideology different views (2)

• Foucault --
• Power does not just reproduce relations of
  production more pluralistic, localized. (e.g.
  the carceral)
• Discourse// ideology constitute subject
• Against ideology, because
• Ideology implies an opponent -- truth.
• ideology stands in a secondary position relative
  to something which functions as its base, as its
  material economic determinant.

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Althusser

• Anti-Humanism (like Levi-Strauss, Lacan,
  Foucault, Derrida)
• Structuralist Marxism, renovation of historical
  materialism. (social formation a more
  de-centered view of social causality)
• Separates Ideology from sciencedivide Marxs
  work into three periods ideological,
  transitional and scientific
• Borrow from Freud and Lacan the Imaginary
  (ideology) mirror stage

12
Jameson "On Interpretation"

• dialectical criticism metacommentary
• mediation,
• three levels of interpretation
• History
• Issues for Debate

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metacommentary

• -- "Interpretation is here construed as an
  essentially allegorical act, which consists in
  rewriting a given text in terms of a particular
  interpretive master code." (10) -- will always
  recognise the historical origins of its own
  concepts, the "master codes" it uses, and will
  never allow the concepts to ossify and become
  insensitive to  the presuure of reality.  --will
  seek to unmask the inner form of a genre or body
  of texts and will work from the surface of a work
  inward  to the level where literary form is
  deeply related to the concrete.

14
Three levels' of Causality --

• Jameson's criticism of Althusser
• 1.mechanical causality  (billiard ball
  causality)  applicable to analysis of local
  events 2. Hegel's and Stalin's "expressive
  causality" --homogeniety of the levels and
  totalization 3. Structural causality
  Althussers

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Mediation revised view of social totality

• Mediation is the classical dialectical term for
  the establishment of relationship between, say,
  the formal analysis of a work of art and its
  social ground, or between the internal dynamics
  of the political state and its economic base.
• -- a process of transcoding as the invention of
  a set of terms, the strategic choice of a
  particular code or language, such that the same
  terminology can be used to analyze and articulate
  two quite distinct types of objects or "text," .
  . . (40)

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Mediation (2) revised view of social totality

• Different kinds of mediation
• Through separation and differentiation --
  structural causality
• through identification -- expressive causality
  "Althusserian structural causality is therefore
  just as fundamentally a practice of mediation as
  is the expressive causality to which it is
  opposed." (41)

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Homology vs. ultimate determinism

• Use contemporary materialist studies of Language
  as an example to argue against simple homology
• Use Greimas semiotic to analyze the deep
  structure of language (semiotic rectanglebased
  on the principles of contradiction and opposition
  p. 46)

18
Ideology and Lukacs concept of totality as
methodolgy

• Ideology strategies of containment
• Totality a methodological standard.
• Totalization a way to unmask ideology as
  strategies of containment.
• Poststructualism (e.g. Derrida, Deleuze, etc.)
  reconfirm the status of the concept of totality
  by their very reaction against it. (53)
• The multiplicity and discontinuity found by
  poststructuralist readers should be reunified if
  not at the level of work itself, then at the
  level of its process of production. . . (The
  former an initial moment of an Althusserian
  exegesis.

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three horizons of criticism

• immanent analysis
• Text as a symbolic act
• how history enters a text as an absent cause or
  subtext (1945- 56)
• Semiotic rectangle // ideological closure
• socio-discourse analysis
• class as relational,
• Text as parole in class discourse as langue
  dialogical ideologemes
• Historical reading
• Cultural revolution both synchronic and
  diachronic
• Ideology of formcontradictions produced by
  varied sign systems

20
Text as a Symbolic Act

• Caduveo girl
• by Guido Boggiani (source)
• Construing formal patterns as a symbolic
  enactment of the social within the formal and
  aesthetic.

21
History

1. as an absent cause "it History is inaccessible
   except through textual forms. amd . . . our
   approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily
   passes through its prior textualization, its
   narrativization in the political unconscious."
   (33/1946) -- History as Necessity "History is
   what hurts, it is what refuses desire and set
   inexorable limits to individual as well as
   collective praxis. . . History as ground and
   untranscendable horizon. . . " (102/1959)

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Issues for Debate

• Do you agree with Jamesons analysis of the three
  levels of social causality?
• Do you agree with Jameson that behind the
  pluralist social institutions, society itself is
  a totality, a seamless web, a single
  inconceivable and transindividual process (p.
  41) that behind historical events, there is
  History?
• Do you agree that mediation, or
  trans-codingassimilationdifferentiation, is all
  thats needed in crossing disciplines and social
  levels?

23
References

• Mark Poster. Foucault, Marxism and History First
  published 1984 by Polity Press, Cambridge, in
  association with Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
• David McLellan. Ideology. Buckingham Open UP,
  1st Ed. 1989, 2nd Ed. 1995.