YKTMX
23rd August 2009, 18:26
A chapter from my undergraduate dissertation on the relationship between "commodity fetishism" and ideology.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Up until now we have been trying to trace the Marxist theory of ideology and argue that the basis for its critique of ideology has to be a commitment to the revolutionary subject of Truth.[1] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftn1) But our discussion of ideology has remained somewhat abstract. In this chapter, we will attempt to set out a concrete analysis of the diffusion of ideology in contemporary capitalist society – we move in other words from the origins of ideology in general, to the sources of ideologies in particular. Now, the separation of the political from the economic domain that we are insisting upon in the title of this chapter is clearly one alien to Marxism but it will help to create a useful distinction between two poles in the Marxist writing on the subject: on the one hand we have writers concerned primarily with what is called ‘commodity fetishism’, with the ‘fantastic’ power that products of human labour appear to gain in the market. On the other hand, we have the quite ‘conscious’ ideological hegemony the bourgeoisie attempts to exercise through its domination of the institutions of the state. Are both these phenomena merely instances of the same phenomena? Is fetishism a form of ideology and is ideology a form of fetishism? We will advance the thesis that the ideological function of the state is in a process of decline in relation to the ideological function of the transnational market and its subjects (multinational corporations, NGO’s, organs of international political and economic power). This poses a problem for Marxists, who have traditionally argued that the state is the instrument through which hegemony is exercised and resisted.
“Ideological State Apparatuses”
Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA’s) is probably the concept most commonly associated with Althusser. Like most Althusserian concepts, it strikes us immediately as a strange mix between orthodoxy and revision. It builds upon pre-existing concepts in Marxism but uses them in quite divergent ways and to different ends.
What Althusser is concerned with, as we suggested in the introduction, is how the ‘relations of exploitation’ are reproduced. The answer comes: partly through violence, but more often and preferably for the ruling class, by gaining the ‘consent’ of a section of the exploited. Reproduction is achieved by a structure with two parts. There is a Repressive State Apparatus (the police, the army etc.) and the ISA’s (principally the education system, but also religion, official trade unionism, the legal system etc.). Both types have ideological functions and repressive functions, but the Repressive State Apparatus (RSA’s) functions “massively and predominantly by ideology” and the ISA’s “massively and dominantly by ideology”.[2] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftn2) The role of the RSA’s is to provide a physical guarantee to the system, in the event that the conditions of reproduction begin to break down. But the ruling classes also seek to exercise their intellectual hegemony and this is left principally to the ISA’s.
In Althusser’s writings, the ‘idea’ is a concept without much value, certainly when seeking a theoretical explanation of capitalism’s reproduction. What concerns Althusser is the ‘material existence’ of ideology. Quite crucially, Althusser inverts the normal schema[3] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftn3), what he calls the ‘ideology of ideology’, which states that people behave in such and such a way because they believe in such and such an ‘idea’. Instead, Althusser insists, it is the material practices co-ordinated by the rituals of the ideological apparatuses that determine our ideas about the world.[4] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftn4) The basic unit of ideology then is not ‘idea’ but ‘action’, or ritualized action.
The ISA’s ‘constitute’ subjects according their ideological forms and those of the class whose interests they represent. Once constituted ideologically (since this is the only way they can be constituted) subjects become subjects for other, greater, Subjects. These Absolute Subjects (the “Nation”, “God”…the Class?) become the guarantee that each subject will ‘work’ without the intervention of the Repressive State Apparatus.[5] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftn5) The class struggle in the domain of the ISA’s consists in a struggle between how different individuals will be ‘interpellated as subject’, how they will be inserted into the system of recognition/misrecognition. Will they recognise themselves in the Absolute Subject or will they reject it in favour of a deviant Subject?
If we apply this to Althusser’s broader theory of ideology, what we get are the claims that ‘praxis is ideological’ and not ‘theory’ – which has important epistemological implications, as we shall see later - and that ideology does not merely provide a ‘mask’ for social relations, but that it involves a form of ‘living’ that is itself ‘imaginary’. In this sense, then, there is a ‘reality of the illusory’.[6] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftn6)
Three clarifications are necessary: Firstly, for Althusser, the ISA’s do not refer only to the institutions commonly referred to as parts of the state. They include “private” institutions like the family. Secondly, as was mentioned previously and as should have become clear, for Althusser, ideology is an eternal feature of human society. It ‘has no history of its own’.[7] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftn7) This is important for our discussion since it casts doubt on the notion that we can ‘overcome’ ideology. Note that this is not all there is to say on this point. Althusser’s distinction between Science and Ideology will be critiqued in the next chapter, when we come to address epistemological dilemmas in Marxism. Finally, while Althusser does suggest that the ISA’s are a site for ‘class struggle’, he never seems to develop this point in the essay. What he appears to be suggesting is that instead of being ‘interpellated as subjects’ by the dominant ideology, individuals can be ‘given’ the status of subject (can have their actions determined, consciousness formed, ethical principles related) by a different ideology. But quite what the purpose of such a venture would be is unclear since, as we know, ‘history is a process without a subject’. If history develops irrespective of the variety of subjectivities it throws up, we seem to be back at the condition we rejected at the start: that ideology is purely a matter of the development of objective forces irrespective of subjects.
Gramsci’s theory of the state has a relation with Althusser’s theory, but in differs in important aspects. He agrees that the principle function of the state is to organize society in the interests of the dominant social group, but he identifies a series of problems apparently not recommended by Althusser.[8] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftn8) For instance, he emphasises the ‘transformed’ function of the state under the bourgeoisie. The state has become an instrument aimed at ‘absorbing’ whole of society and assimilating it to its own cultural and social level.’[9] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftn9) The state then has an important and quite distinct role for the bourgeoisie. For the bourgeoisie, the ideological functions of the state fulfil a need that it is quite particular to capitalism. If these functions were to break down, to one extent or another, as we will argue they have, this would require a re-adjustment on behalf of the ruling class. This leads us on to our discussion of the ideological functions of the market, and particularly, the commodity form.
Lukács, Žižek and the ‘fetishism of commodities’
The relationship between the Marxist critique of ideology and the concept of ‘commodity fetishism’ is an important and elusive one. Again, Lukács takes credit for elucidating a theme that Marx had not developed to quite its fullest extent. Indeed, History and Class Consciousness is notable for its critique of the ‘alienating’ effects of the commodity form before the 1844 Manuscripts had been published. The impact of his path-breaking analysis can be seen even today, particularly in the writings of Slavoj Žižek, a writer who has done much to popularise and give contemporary relevance to the Marxist critique of capitalism.
The relationship we are trying to trace is the one hinted at but never developed properly in our opening paragraph, namely the ‘problems growing out of the fetish character of commodities, both as an objective form and also a subjective stance corresponding to it.’[10] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftn10) The common definition of commodity fetishism is the one given by Marx, who says that ‘commodity fetishism’ is the position whereby a ‘definite social relation between men assumes, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things’.[11] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftn11) The ruling classes find this condition felicitous, as it helps to conceal and mask the relations of domination between capitalist and worker. For the proletariat, it results in a crippling ‘estrangement’ or ‘alienation’ from the products of their labour. The labour of man is transformed from a fully human experience, a moment expressing essence, into the ‘emasculating experience’ of an activity that should be fulfilling ‘turned against him’ – he becomes estranged from himself and his species-being.[12] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftn12)
As Lukács notes, whilst we can’t say that commodities only arise with capitalism (people have been ‘exchanging’ goods ever since there was a surplus of the bare necessities), we can say that the ‘dominance of commodities’ in capitalism (the transformation of almost everything into an exchange-value, even labour) leads to the commodity form becoming the ‘universal structuring principle’ of society as a whole.[13] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftn13) This is a crucial distinction from any previous human society.
The commodity becomes not merely the ‘mode of appearance’ for use-values, but a form that structures the entire social edifice and the subjectivities that comprise it. This is the ideology of the market. But it is an ideology that, in distinction from ideology “pumped out” by the ISA’s, is, to some extent, unconscious and spontaneous. So, as Žižek writes, ‘the dialectics of the commodity-form presents us with…a mechanism offering us theoretical understanding of phenomena which, at first sight, have nothing to do with the field of political economy’.[14] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftn14) Analysis of the commodity form offers us an insight into the whole superstructural field. The commodity is the primary ontological category of bourgeois society. In other words, ‘ideological’ is not the name for some ‘idea’ aimed at providing a particular interpretation (“false consciousness”) of the social reality: it is the social reality itself that is always-already ideological.[15] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftn15)
This has implications for the ‘critique of ideology’ that seem important. But if the thesis we set out at the beginning of this chapter is correct (“the ideological function of the state is in a process of decline”) then it certainly means we cannot speak of an “end of ideology” – far from it. What it suggests, in fact, is that the economic victory of capital throughout the globe has produced an Age of Ideology more complete than ever. The “fantastic” power of the products of labour becomes overwhelming. The global division of labour hides the process of material production in the miserable sweatshops of far-flung countries in the Third World. We have less and less contact with the productive processes and the relations behind them that produce wealth. In a world where the commodity-form dominates, ideological phenomena associated with it also necessarily dominate. As the state loses its power to organize society intellectually - as a result of widespread “cynicism” towards traditional authority and the ideologies that legitimize it – the market becomes the main source of capital’s hegemony over society. The fetishism of commodities ensures that ‘relations between men’ no longer justifiable through ‘grand narratives’ become eternally mystified.[16] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftn16) The site of (reformist) social struggle is displaced from the state and into the market – hence the widespread tactic of “ethical consumerism” and the proliferation of NGO’s. Capital also responds to the decline by expanding the power of transnational corporations and international organs of economic and political power (the IMF, World Bank etc, etc.).
Of course we “know” all these things, but we cannot but behave as if we don’t.[17] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftn17) This notion that ideology is “non-knowledge” of real nature of the social reality is crucial to the critique of it, assuming that we value knowledge of the real nature of things. But this presupposes an alternative theory of attaining ‘knowledge’. That Marxism requires an epistemology is a fact, although an unsettling one given the myriad of dilemmas involved. The next chapter will assess Lukács and Althusser’s approach to the question of Marxism’s epistemological basis.
[1] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftnref1) I shall state precisely what I mean by this in the last chapter.
[2] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftnref2) Althusser, On Ideology, p. 22
[3] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftnref3) Althusser insists this isn’t an ‘inversion’ but a ‘dropping’ of one set of terms in favour of another. But the term seems to have value in any case.
[4] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftnref4) Ibid, pp. 42-44
[5] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftnref5) Ibid, p. 54-55
[6] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftnref6) Ricoeur, Paul, Althusser’s Theory of Ideology, in Elliot, Gregory (ed), Althusser: A Critical Reader (Blackwell, Oxford, 1994) p. 60
[7] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftnref7) Althusser, On Ideology, p. 34
[8] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftnref8) Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 258
[9] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftnref9) Ibid, p. 260
[10] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftnref10) Lukaćs, History and Class Consciousness, p. 84
[11] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftnref11) Cited in Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, p. 56
[12] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftnref12) Marx, 1844 Manuscripts, p. 67
[13] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftnref13) Lukaćs, History and Class Consciousness, p. 85
[14] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftnref14) Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology (Verso, London, 1999) p. 16
[15] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftnref15) Ibid, p. 21
[16] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftnref16) As an aside, perhaps it is the case that decline in the ideological function of the state can help explain the increase in the repressive aspects of the state – the proliferation of “anti-terror” laws, mass incarceration etc.
[17] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftnref17) Ibid, p. 32
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Up until now we have been trying to trace the Marxist theory of ideology and argue that the basis for its critique of ideology has to be a commitment to the revolutionary subject of Truth.[1] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftn1) But our discussion of ideology has remained somewhat abstract. In this chapter, we will attempt to set out a concrete analysis of the diffusion of ideology in contemporary capitalist society – we move in other words from the origins of ideology in general, to the sources of ideologies in particular. Now, the separation of the political from the economic domain that we are insisting upon in the title of this chapter is clearly one alien to Marxism but it will help to create a useful distinction between two poles in the Marxist writing on the subject: on the one hand we have writers concerned primarily with what is called ‘commodity fetishism’, with the ‘fantastic’ power that products of human labour appear to gain in the market. On the other hand, we have the quite ‘conscious’ ideological hegemony the bourgeoisie attempts to exercise through its domination of the institutions of the state. Are both these phenomena merely instances of the same phenomena? Is fetishism a form of ideology and is ideology a form of fetishism? We will advance the thesis that the ideological function of the state is in a process of decline in relation to the ideological function of the transnational market and its subjects (multinational corporations, NGO’s, organs of international political and economic power). This poses a problem for Marxists, who have traditionally argued that the state is the instrument through which hegemony is exercised and resisted.
“Ideological State Apparatuses”
Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA’s) is probably the concept most commonly associated with Althusser. Like most Althusserian concepts, it strikes us immediately as a strange mix between orthodoxy and revision. It builds upon pre-existing concepts in Marxism but uses them in quite divergent ways and to different ends.
What Althusser is concerned with, as we suggested in the introduction, is how the ‘relations of exploitation’ are reproduced. The answer comes: partly through violence, but more often and preferably for the ruling class, by gaining the ‘consent’ of a section of the exploited. Reproduction is achieved by a structure with two parts. There is a Repressive State Apparatus (the police, the army etc.) and the ISA’s (principally the education system, but also religion, official trade unionism, the legal system etc.). Both types have ideological functions and repressive functions, but the Repressive State Apparatus (RSA’s) functions “massively and predominantly by ideology” and the ISA’s “massively and dominantly by ideology”.[2] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftn2) The role of the RSA’s is to provide a physical guarantee to the system, in the event that the conditions of reproduction begin to break down. But the ruling classes also seek to exercise their intellectual hegemony and this is left principally to the ISA’s.
In Althusser’s writings, the ‘idea’ is a concept without much value, certainly when seeking a theoretical explanation of capitalism’s reproduction. What concerns Althusser is the ‘material existence’ of ideology. Quite crucially, Althusser inverts the normal schema[3] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftn3), what he calls the ‘ideology of ideology’, which states that people behave in such and such a way because they believe in such and such an ‘idea’. Instead, Althusser insists, it is the material practices co-ordinated by the rituals of the ideological apparatuses that determine our ideas about the world.[4] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftn4) The basic unit of ideology then is not ‘idea’ but ‘action’, or ritualized action.
The ISA’s ‘constitute’ subjects according their ideological forms and those of the class whose interests they represent. Once constituted ideologically (since this is the only way they can be constituted) subjects become subjects for other, greater, Subjects. These Absolute Subjects (the “Nation”, “God”…the Class?) become the guarantee that each subject will ‘work’ without the intervention of the Repressive State Apparatus.[5] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftn5) The class struggle in the domain of the ISA’s consists in a struggle between how different individuals will be ‘interpellated as subject’, how they will be inserted into the system of recognition/misrecognition. Will they recognise themselves in the Absolute Subject or will they reject it in favour of a deviant Subject?
If we apply this to Althusser’s broader theory of ideology, what we get are the claims that ‘praxis is ideological’ and not ‘theory’ – which has important epistemological implications, as we shall see later - and that ideology does not merely provide a ‘mask’ for social relations, but that it involves a form of ‘living’ that is itself ‘imaginary’. In this sense, then, there is a ‘reality of the illusory’.[6] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftn6)
Three clarifications are necessary: Firstly, for Althusser, the ISA’s do not refer only to the institutions commonly referred to as parts of the state. They include “private” institutions like the family. Secondly, as was mentioned previously and as should have become clear, for Althusser, ideology is an eternal feature of human society. It ‘has no history of its own’.[7] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftn7) This is important for our discussion since it casts doubt on the notion that we can ‘overcome’ ideology. Note that this is not all there is to say on this point. Althusser’s distinction between Science and Ideology will be critiqued in the next chapter, when we come to address epistemological dilemmas in Marxism. Finally, while Althusser does suggest that the ISA’s are a site for ‘class struggle’, he never seems to develop this point in the essay. What he appears to be suggesting is that instead of being ‘interpellated as subjects’ by the dominant ideology, individuals can be ‘given’ the status of subject (can have their actions determined, consciousness formed, ethical principles related) by a different ideology. But quite what the purpose of such a venture would be is unclear since, as we know, ‘history is a process without a subject’. If history develops irrespective of the variety of subjectivities it throws up, we seem to be back at the condition we rejected at the start: that ideology is purely a matter of the development of objective forces irrespective of subjects.
Gramsci’s theory of the state has a relation with Althusser’s theory, but in differs in important aspects. He agrees that the principle function of the state is to organize society in the interests of the dominant social group, but he identifies a series of problems apparently not recommended by Althusser.[8] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftn8) For instance, he emphasises the ‘transformed’ function of the state under the bourgeoisie. The state has become an instrument aimed at ‘absorbing’ whole of society and assimilating it to its own cultural and social level.’[9] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftn9) The state then has an important and quite distinct role for the bourgeoisie. For the bourgeoisie, the ideological functions of the state fulfil a need that it is quite particular to capitalism. If these functions were to break down, to one extent or another, as we will argue they have, this would require a re-adjustment on behalf of the ruling class. This leads us on to our discussion of the ideological functions of the market, and particularly, the commodity form.
Lukács, Žižek and the ‘fetishism of commodities’
The relationship between the Marxist critique of ideology and the concept of ‘commodity fetishism’ is an important and elusive one. Again, Lukács takes credit for elucidating a theme that Marx had not developed to quite its fullest extent. Indeed, History and Class Consciousness is notable for its critique of the ‘alienating’ effects of the commodity form before the 1844 Manuscripts had been published. The impact of his path-breaking analysis can be seen even today, particularly in the writings of Slavoj Žižek, a writer who has done much to popularise and give contemporary relevance to the Marxist critique of capitalism.
The relationship we are trying to trace is the one hinted at but never developed properly in our opening paragraph, namely the ‘problems growing out of the fetish character of commodities, both as an objective form and also a subjective stance corresponding to it.’[10] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftn10) The common definition of commodity fetishism is the one given by Marx, who says that ‘commodity fetishism’ is the position whereby a ‘definite social relation between men assumes, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things’.[11] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftn11) The ruling classes find this condition felicitous, as it helps to conceal and mask the relations of domination between capitalist and worker. For the proletariat, it results in a crippling ‘estrangement’ or ‘alienation’ from the products of their labour. The labour of man is transformed from a fully human experience, a moment expressing essence, into the ‘emasculating experience’ of an activity that should be fulfilling ‘turned against him’ – he becomes estranged from himself and his species-being.[12] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftn12)
As Lukács notes, whilst we can’t say that commodities only arise with capitalism (people have been ‘exchanging’ goods ever since there was a surplus of the bare necessities), we can say that the ‘dominance of commodities’ in capitalism (the transformation of almost everything into an exchange-value, even labour) leads to the commodity form becoming the ‘universal structuring principle’ of society as a whole.[13] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftn13) This is a crucial distinction from any previous human society.
The commodity becomes not merely the ‘mode of appearance’ for use-values, but a form that structures the entire social edifice and the subjectivities that comprise it. This is the ideology of the market. But it is an ideology that, in distinction from ideology “pumped out” by the ISA’s, is, to some extent, unconscious and spontaneous. So, as Žižek writes, ‘the dialectics of the commodity-form presents us with…a mechanism offering us theoretical understanding of phenomena which, at first sight, have nothing to do with the field of political economy’.[14] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftn14) Analysis of the commodity form offers us an insight into the whole superstructural field. The commodity is the primary ontological category of bourgeois society. In other words, ‘ideological’ is not the name for some ‘idea’ aimed at providing a particular interpretation (“false consciousness”) of the social reality: it is the social reality itself that is always-already ideological.[15] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftn15)
This has implications for the ‘critique of ideology’ that seem important. But if the thesis we set out at the beginning of this chapter is correct (“the ideological function of the state is in a process of decline”) then it certainly means we cannot speak of an “end of ideology” – far from it. What it suggests, in fact, is that the economic victory of capital throughout the globe has produced an Age of Ideology more complete than ever. The “fantastic” power of the products of labour becomes overwhelming. The global division of labour hides the process of material production in the miserable sweatshops of far-flung countries in the Third World. We have less and less contact with the productive processes and the relations behind them that produce wealth. In a world where the commodity-form dominates, ideological phenomena associated with it also necessarily dominate. As the state loses its power to organize society intellectually - as a result of widespread “cynicism” towards traditional authority and the ideologies that legitimize it – the market becomes the main source of capital’s hegemony over society. The fetishism of commodities ensures that ‘relations between men’ no longer justifiable through ‘grand narratives’ become eternally mystified.[16] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftn16) The site of (reformist) social struggle is displaced from the state and into the market – hence the widespread tactic of “ethical consumerism” and the proliferation of NGO’s. Capital also responds to the decline by expanding the power of transnational corporations and international organs of economic and political power (the IMF, World Bank etc, etc.).
Of course we “know” all these things, but we cannot but behave as if we don’t.[17] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftn17) This notion that ideology is “non-knowledge” of real nature of the social reality is crucial to the critique of it, assuming that we value knowledge of the real nature of things. But this presupposes an alternative theory of attaining ‘knowledge’. That Marxism requires an epistemology is a fact, although an unsettling one given the myriad of dilemmas involved. The next chapter will assess Lukács and Althusser’s approach to the question of Marxism’s epistemological basis.
[1] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftnref1) I shall state precisely what I mean by this in the last chapter.
[2] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftnref2) Althusser, On Ideology, p. 22
[3] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftnref3) Althusser insists this isn’t an ‘inversion’ but a ‘dropping’ of one set of terms in favour of another. But the term seems to have value in any case.
[4] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftnref4) Ibid, pp. 42-44
[5] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftnref5) Ibid, p. 54-55
[6] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftnref6) Ricoeur, Paul, Althusser’s Theory of Ideology, in Elliot, Gregory (ed), Althusser: A Critical Reader (Blackwell, Oxford, 1994) p. 60
[7] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftnref7) Althusser, On Ideology, p. 34
[8] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftnref8) Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 258
[9] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftnref9) Ibid, p. 260
[10] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftnref10) Lukaćs, History and Class Consciousness, p. 84
[11] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftnref11) Cited in Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, p. 56
[12] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftnref12) Marx, 1844 Manuscripts, p. 67
[13] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftnref13) Lukaćs, History and Class Consciousness, p. 85
[14] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftnref14) Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology (Verso, London, 1999) p. 16
[15] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftnref15) Ibid, p. 21
[16] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftnref16) As an aside, perhaps it is the case that decline in the ideological function of the state can help explain the increase in the repressive aspects of the state – the proliferation of “anti-terror” laws, mass incarceration etc.
[17] (http://www.revleft.com/vb/newthread.php?do=newthread&f=16#_ftnref17) Ibid, p. 32