Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill and Bryan S. Turner, from MAPPING IDEOLOGY

Rather than reading this version which is a draft, you can download the corrected and cleaned up text of all the annotations and my introduction to them here now called, "One Possible Narrative of the Concept of Ideology since Marx". 

“Determinacy and Indeterminacy in the Theory of Ideology” - Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill and Bryan S. Turner

I could not find a picture with the three authors, and could only find two single shots,
so you'll have to make do with the cover of their book

So, these three sociologists are the author of the Dominant Ideology Thesis (1980) a sustained polemic against ideology in general, a plethora of marxist thinkers of the term, the effectivity of ideology, the notion that ideology is involved with subject constitution, and the idea that an ideology might be dominant at all. But this article is reprinted from New Left Review in late 1983 and is a review of Göran Therborn’s The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology which appeared in the same year. The NLR editors solicited this review Therborn by the authors here (henceforth shortened to AHT) and a review of their book (DIT, subsequently here) by Therborn. DIT did not include any coverage of Therborn, and so this review basically seeks to provide that coverage.

There are good things about this text and DIT, both make use of many historical and sociological examples, and if it is/was the case that there are theorists that uphold the thesis as they posit it, then it might well be devastating. Whether anyone truly holds the position that they align themselves against or not, the writings of AHT on this topic should probably be required reading for anyone interested in the topic as their critique does serious damage to many of the more expansive and high-flown speculative extension of the topic that one encounters (or used to). That said, it is also of a piece with certain works in the field of analytic philosophy that seek to debunk those based in continental thought, and more generally with the, then relatively new, backlash against French theory in the Anglo-American context (often via pragmatism, empiricism, etc). 

But this text is about Therborn’s book, which the praise (rather faintly) for its attempt to “synthesize a sociological perspective with Marxism” (152), for its eschewing any notion of ideology as necessarily illusory (153), and for any number of other points that it makes. But on whole this text is quite polemical and damning of Therborn’s labors. From the beginning they fault Therborn’s definition of ideology as being too broad, too close to the sociological definition of culture (153).  They note that Therborn follows Althusser in thinking that ideology is a crucial matrix for the formation of subjects, and they quote his saying that “to search for the structure of the ideological universe is to seek the dimension of human subjectivity” (153). They reproduce a chart which Therborn uses to organize his analysis and consider some of Therborn’s conclusions and extensions of the idea as commonly understood by means of this chart. AHT are particularly interested in Therborn’s claim that “positional ideologies” (those having to do with beliefs about identity and social positioning) necessarily generate an “alter-ideologies” which they gloss as follows, “any ideology of domination must generate resistance in the very act of setting up a Self/Other opposition” (154). While they find this notion intriguing, they fault Therborn for not explaining how such alter-ideologies arise and what role they play in specific historical struggles (154). They applaud Therborn’s claim that there are ideologies based in class as well as others that are not based in class, and somewhat predictably wish he was more critical of the class-based ones and more expansive about those not based in class (155. 163-4). Under the heading “Marxist Dilemmas” the authors observe that virtually all marxist thinkers of ideology acknowledge a degree of autonomy between an ideology and the economic base but they see this autonomy has have three consequences that are dire for marxist thinking on the topic. 1) “ideology has its own laws of motion,” by which they mean, if there is some autonomy and no one-to-one relation of base to ideological superstructure (as evidenced by capitalism seeming to work find in both fascist and liberal political contexts) then how to discern what is and what is not a reflection of the material base? Indeed, this is a problem, if one holds that the superstructure is, in its essence, a reflection of the economic base of a society (the trouble being finding any theorist who maintains this view - it not being held in this way by any of the thinkers considered in DIT and certainly is not Therborn’s position either. (155). Second “ideology may be effective in giving a particular form to the economy” (155). At first glance, this does not seem like a critique, but it seems that what AHT have in mind is that if it could be shown that an ideology, the protestant ethic, as an example, was productive of economic practices that were effective, that this would be a problem. Is the idea that, if it works there is nothing to critique? Fascism has a demonstrated ability in any number of cases of rallying the people and getting everyone working together, would this make it immune to critique? Their third point is about ideologies not based in class, which would then not be engaged in the class struggle and not motivated by the contradictions in the social realm that emerge from the economic base (155-6). Some thinkers of ideology would claim that ideologies must have class determinations and though he does not make that claim, Therborn does insist that even non-class-based ideologies are “overdetermined by the constellation of class forces”  (Therborn qtd 157). What AHT demand is a point by point explanation of exactly how class forces overdetermine these things (this sort of demand-critique is common in DIT and strikes me as somewhat curious on the grounds that they dispute the possibility of any theory of ideology in general, but nonetheless demand a theory of overdetermination in general - and yet when any attempt is made to provide such a theory (by Althusser or Poulantzas for example) is made, they reject it for its lack of particularity, in short for its generality. This approach is echoed in their repeated criticisms of Therborn and others are holding to “functionalist” conceptions (which is something of a sociological insult in some circles) while seeming to demand greater transparency in his account of how they function. Their critique of Therborn on the points above tacitly assumes throughout that he holds to what is generally called a “vulgar marxist” viewpoint, even as they congratulate him for every assumption that they can find reflected in sociological theory (while at times chiding him for not saying so, or not having kept up with work in sociology on this topic). 

Their next focus, and this one is obviously quite dear to them, is the relation of ideology to subjects. They criticize Therborn’s four-fold model of types of subjectivity and his claim that these four exhaust the modalities of ideological subject construction, indeed of subjectivities per se (158-9). Here I agree in part with them as, at least as they quote him, Therborn does claim that there are but these four types of subjects and as AHT pointed our earlier (155, and at 159) this chat’s four discrete types does appear to have very porous boundaries and I have had difficulty situating specific ideological positions firmly in one or another of them. But their real target is not this heuristic chart but the notion that the constitution of subjectivity has anything at all to do with ideology. They deploy some interesting questions vis-a-vis the notion of subject of ideology when they ask about legal persons, fictional individuals (corporations), slaves (who are bodies, but not persons), etc (159). They may well be right that Therborn assumes “the unity of body and subject” (159) but to turn one of their tactics back on them, one might ask if this is such an important point, why exactly is it important? There is no answer to be found either here or in DIT to this question. Similarly, while they dispute that ideologies are either necessary or particularly important in the construction of subjectivity (159-61) it is curious, not that do not offer any account of subject formation (this being a review article after all) but that they do not even gesture toward such an account. Should one conclude that in the view of AHT there are no subjects at all, or that there are subjects but that their genesis requires no account, or what exactly? The text is silent on these issues. 

Their concluding section is called “The Dilemmas of Indeterminacy” and therein they note with appreciation that Therborn does not think that ideologies exist as fully articulated bodies of thought, but are rather internally “complex and inconsistent” (162). They claim that “ideological variation increases  with the development of late capitalism” and that this has two consequences, 1) that “‘dull compulsion’ is adequate for the subordination of the worker” and 2) that “there is no economic requirement for a dominant ideology” (164). Their first point about dull compulsion (the phrase is from Marx) does not seem to really land, and the dominant reason for this that throughout their book and this article they equate ideology with a set of fixed beliefs and nowhere consider it as a body of practices which have a component of ideation, but may never be consciously articulated by social subjects even as they staunchly operate within the established parameters of those practices. Apropos the second point it seems worth pointing out that Therborn does not appear to be a vulgar marxist who assumes that changes in the economy immediately find reflection in the superstructure. Therborn does assume that there are connections, but it seems to me that - in line with some of what AHT would like to insist - Therborn does allow for contingency and indeterminacy in these connections. Nowhere have I seen evidence given that Therborn holds what they call the dominant ideology thesis, as such the second point above may or may not have any purchase on his position. I suspect that Therborn would argue that the economy as system, is embodied in practices which taken in toto, could be articulated as a more or less coherent statement of its ideology and that as a consequence, if this system of economics is the dominant one, that its ideology is the dominant ideology. But whether, if I am right, this damns Therborn to the dominant ideology thesis as propounded-to-be-destroyed by AHT is quite another matter. But their insistence upon indeterminacy and contingency (not, in themselves, bad things) leads them to say that there “is clearly something of a dilemma here between a general determinate analysis, which does not allow for the contingencies of ideology, and an indeterminate analysis which does not allow general claims” (163). Here one might wonder about the language game that is being played. Why shouldn’t a determinate analysis be able to make allowances for contingency (whether of ideology or other factors)? Doesn’t history generally make determinate analyses of its objects while trying not to forget that there were contingencies that may look in retrospect as if they were not contingent, or alternately may not be visible (recorded) at all? And I find myself perplexed in some ways by the very term indeterminate analysis and challenged to imagine anything corresponding to that which would not be general, as were it specific or particular would it not immediately cease to be an indeterminate analysis? 

This is a gratuitous image, maybe.