Terry Eagleton, 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". 

“Ideology and its Vicissitudes in Western Marxism” - Terry Eagleton

Terry Eagleton

This chapter of Mapping Ideology is two chapters of Eagleton’s book Ideology in which he is surveying the uses made and criticisms of the notions of ideology as well as certain other ideas which overlap with it in the thought of folks like Gramsci and Bourdieu. As this is already a summative text and I am summarizing further, I will make use a more schematic presentation in hopes of doing as much justice as I can to the wealth of detail presented here. 

György Lukács is given extensive coverage here focusing on History and Class Consciousness (1922). As Eagleton glosses his thought, Lukács’ position on sometimes the split between thought and existence is to argue that “in the act of understanding its real conditions, an oppressed group of class has begun (...) to fashion the forms of consciousness that will contribute to changing them” (180). As such the “identity [of thought and existence] is that they are aspects of one and the same real historical and dialectical process” (180). The other of ideology in his view is not science (not even “Marxist science”) but rather the notion of the social totality itself (181). In Lukács’ view the “self-consciousness of the proletariat” is “the commodity form coming to an awareness of itself, and in that act transcending itself” (181). Given that any knowledge that is not of the totality would be partial and hence ideological, Lukács argues that “certain forms of knowledge - notably, the self-knowledge of an exploited class - which, while thoroughly historical, are nevertheless able to lay bare the limits of other ideologies, and so to figure as an emancipatory force” (181-2). Lukács is aware that a simple contrast between ideology and totality is misleading, but he argues that “oppressed groups and classes , need to need to get some view of the social system as a whole” if they are to effect changes, thus, without “passing over at some point from the particular to the general, those interests are likely to founder” (182). But Eagleton identifies a variety of problems in Lukács’ account as well. There is a logical issue: if the proletariat is somehow the bearer of “‘true’ class consciousness, from what viewpoint is this judgment made?” (183). This claim seems unable to avoid being simply a dogmatic assertion. Lukács also develops and relies heavily upon the notion of reification, which he sees as rampant in society and conducive to “a pervasive mechanization, quantification and dehumanization of human experience” (183). Against this the proletarian, in recognizing his class consciousness performs an aufhebung, thereby uniting subject and object (what reification otherwise acts to prevent) (184). “Ideology for Lukács is thus not exactly a discourse untrue to the way things are, but one true to them only in a limited, superficial way, ignorant of their deeper tendencies” (184). Lukács’ economism is problematic for Eagleton (and many others) as well as his all-purpose answer to all problems: reification (185). This insistence betrays a species of idealism in Eagleton’s view (185). Eagleton also points to a conflicting conception of ideology at work in Lukács, on the one hand he hews close to Marx and thinks of commodity fetishism as “an objective material structure” rather than a “state of mind” but in other places he seems to imply that there is an “essence” derivable from the “collective subjectivity” of classes. Lukács then “presumes too organic and internal a relation between a ‘class subject’ and its ‘world-view’” (187). Eagleton also has some issues with Lukács notion that social classes are themselves subjects. He writes that classes “are certainly for Marxism historical agents; but they are structural, material formations as well as ‘intersubjective’ entities, and the problem is how to think these two aspects of them together” (187). “If Lukács is residually idealist in the high priority that he assigns to consciousness, so he is also in his Romantic hostility to science, logic and technology” (189). Seemingly (as with Adorno in some ways) all such discourses are inherently reifying, ergo, to be avoided. Eagleton then uncovers yet another sense of the term ideology in Lukács, that of “structurally constrained thought” (190) suggesting that, in Lukács’ view, “when we keep running up against a limit in our conceptions” that it is our social practices themselves which “pose the obstacle to the very ideas which seek to explain them” meaning that we must change the forms of our lives if we are move beyond this deadlock (190). As a final exemplification of the complexity of Lukács’ thinking about ideology, Eagleton writes that for him “Bourgeois ideology may be false from the standpoint of some putative social totality, but this does not mean that it is false to the situation as it currently is” (191). 

Karl Mannheim is next up for Eagleton’s survey, though he doesn’t fair very well as a thinking of ideology. Mannheim’s basic thesis is that ideology is partial and interested and thus lacking, it will be corrected by being “subsumed into some greater totality” which is “disinterested” according to Mannheim. Eagleton counters “[i]sn’t the interest in totality just another interest?” (194). Mannheim essentially reduces ideology to merely false statements which are produced by individuals’ psychological situation, thereby ignoring ideology as embodied material practice along the lines of commodity fetishism, etc and makes no room at all for thinking of how they are linked to power, involved in struggle, etc (194-5).

Next up is Antonio Gramsci who does use the term ideology but in a casual way as his own ‘load-bearing’ concept is that of hegemony. In Eagleton’s view hegemony is for Gramsci a “broader category than ideology: it includes ideology, but is not reducible to it” (195-6). What then is hegemony for Gramsci? Hegemony is the “whole range of practical strategies by which a dominant power elicits consent to its rule from those it subjugates” (198). The preceding stresses consent, and this is the dominant meaning that Gramsci seems to rely upon, though at times he does combine consent and coercion (195). But hegemony, unlike ideology in Gramsci’s view, may assert itself through political, economic, and other means whereas for him, ideology “refers specifically to the way power struggles are fought at the level of signification” (196). In a moment of potential confusion (apropos the last quotation) a page later Eagleton remarks that with Gramsci “the crucial transition is effected from ideology as ‘system of ideas’ to ideology as lived, habitual social practice” (197). Raymond Williams discusses Gramsci acknowledging “the dynamic character of hegemony, as against the potentially static connotations of ‘ideology’” (197) arguing that “hegemony is never a once-and-for-all achievement, but ‘has to be renewed, recreated, defended, and modified’” (197-8). Returning to the notion of ideology in Gramsci, he distinguishes between “‘historically organic’ ideologies - meaning those necessary to a given social structure - and ideology in the sense of the arbitrary speculations of individuals” (198-9). Gramsci argues that “ideologies must be viewed as actively organizing forces that are psychologically ‘valid’, fashioning the terrain on which men and women act, struggle and acquire consciousness of their social positions” (199).

We then reach, in Eagleton’s account, Theodor Adorno (and a few passing comments on Horkheimer and Marcuse). He begins by pointing out that the notion of exchange value in Marx is also useful for thinking about ideology (200). It a pack of cigarettes and a roast beef sandwich cost the same amount, they have the same exchange value (at least at the point of sale). This abstract equivalence subordinates the real material differences between them and elides the human labor that went into them entirely. The same process can be observed, Eagleton writes, in capitalist societies where we all have “theoretical equivalence” before the law, even if “this merely obscures the way in which the law itself is ultimately on the side of the propertied” (200-1). Adorno - pace Eagleton - sees ideological thought as engaged in just such suspect equivalences (201). “Ideology for Adorno is thus a form of ‘identity-thinking’ - a covertly paranoid style of rationality which inexorably transmutes the uniqueness and plurality of things into a mere simulacrum of itself” (201). Hence, negative dialectics (as we have already seen). Adorno poses, against ideology then, heterogeneity. But “Adorno” (unlike some French post-structuralists) “neither uncritically celebrates the notion of difference nor unequivocally denounces the principle of identity” (202). Eagleton points to much the same problem here as we have already encountered, that reason is both being used and being decried as the cause of all the problems. He mentions the book with Horkheimer Dialectic of Enlightenment wherein in his reading “[s]imply to think is to be guiltily complicit with ideological domination” (202). Og Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, Eagleton remarks that it “parodies the whole notion of ideology” (202) and in his view it “simply projects the ‘extreme’ ideological universe of Fascism on to the quite different structures of liberal capitalist regimes” (203). He concludes that Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse give us a “straw target of ideology” and argues that it is “pure formalism to imagine that otherness, heterogeneity and marginality are unqualified political benefits regardless of their concrete social content” (203).

For Jürgen Habermas ideology “is a form of communication systematically distorted by power - a discourse which has become a medium of domination” (203). And, rather than any assertion that such a situation can be remedied by clearer or better thought, he “draws attention to the possibility of an entire discursive system which is somehow deformed (...) bent out of shape by power interests” (204). And for Habermas, this is not a situation of always external power effecting language because this deformity “inscribes itself on the inside of our speech, so that ideology becomes a set of effects internal to particular discourses themselves” (204). Be this as it may, Habermas believes that as language users we all have “some idea of what an ‘authentic’ communicative act wold be like” (204) and this gives us a chance at discovering and bring to bear “a norm or regulative model for the critical assessment” of ideological discourses (205). “The opposite of ideology for Habermas is not exactly truth or knowledge, but that particular form of ‘interested’ rationality we call emancipatory critique” (207). Eagleton then (surprising me in the process) begins contrasting Freud and Habermas in a number of interesting ways. Eagleton remarks that both thinkers refuse to treat “idealized world-views” (or fantasies) as “just illusions” and says that both think that they encode “genuine human desires” (207-8). Habermas, says Eagleton, sees “psychoanalysis as a discourse which seeks to emancipate us from systematically distorted communication” and regards pathological symptoms as “roughly equivalent to ideology’s ‘performative contradictions’” (208). Habermas also, like Freud, would argue that it is not enough to decipher a text but that we must account for the forces that deformed it, what Freud would the dream work. Thus for both thinkers, the focus is on “the points where meaning and force intersect” (208) and both the speech of the neurotic and the ideological discourse are for both “doubled” texts  (209) which ought not be reduced to either manifest of latent levels as the issue is the force that brought about the doubling. Eagleton then pursues another Freudian notion’s relevance to ideology (though it is not one that Habermas mentions), that of the “compromise formation” (209). The point here is that “a neurotic symptom (...) both reveals and conceals at once” which is also true to ideology in his view (209). And, inline with analytic thinking about this, the “‘truth’ (...) lies in neither the revelation nor the concealment alone, but in the contradictory unity they compose” (209). The compromise formation, and indeed any symptom, must then be seen as “not simply expressive of some underlying problem, but (...) an active, if mystified, form of engagement with it” (210). Many consequences would seem to follow from this analytically speaking, though as Eagleton does not pursue those here, I shall not either.

The resolutely anti-humanist Louis Althusser has no interest in reification or alienation as concepts, as both betray for him their humanist presuppositions and thus both concepts would be situated before the “epistemological break” that precedes the writing of Capital (211). “Althusser holds that all thought is conducted within the terms of an unconscious ‘problematic’ which silently underpins it” (211). A problematic “is a particular organization of categories which at any given historical moment constitutes the limits of what we are able to utter and conceive” (211). The problematic of an ideology “turns around certain eloquent silences and elisions; and it is so constructed that the questions which are posable within it already presuppose certain kinds of answer” (211-2). Because of this, “ideologies give the appearance of moving forward while marching stubbornly on the spot” (212). As Althusser has already been dealt with at some length, I will focus here on what Eagleton brings to light which I did not and what criticisms he has to offer. Against some critics of Althusser, Eagleton argues that for Althusser while “historical circumstances thoroughly condition our knowledge” that this does not entail that “our truth claims are reducible to our historical interests” (212). Having already noted Althusser’s debt to Lacan, Eagleton highlights the issue of the subject that is crucial for both, saying that “[w]e become conscious agents only by virtue of a certain determinate lack, repression of omission, which no amount of critical self-reflection could repair” (213). He stresses the degree to which for Althusser, all action “is carried on within the sphere of ideology” and that “it is ideology alone which lends the human subject enough illusory, provisional coherence for it to become a practical social agent” (213). Whereas, for Althusser, from the vantage point of theory (on Eagleton’s reading) “the subject has no such autonomy or consistency at all: it is merely the ‘overdetermined’ product of this or that social structure” (213). But Eagleton has problems with Althusser as well, in that he “seems to rule out the possibility of theoretically informed practice” (213) unless that is, it occurs “through the ‘relay’ of ideology” (214). After a brief restatement of the Mirror-Phase essay, Eagleton spells out how it overlaps with Althusser’s position, saying that in “the ideological sphere (...) the human subject transcends its true state of diffuseness or decentrement and finds a consolingly coherent  image of itself reflected back in the ‘mirror’ of a dominant ideological discourse” (214). After a recapitulation of Althusser’s primary definition and some discussion of the subject-centered character of ideology, Eagleton makes the complaint that, apropos interpellation, that “the subject would have to predate its own existence” (215). He then pushes this back to the mirror-phase as well, asking “[h]ow can the subject recognize image in the mirror as itself, if it does not somehow recognize itself already?” (215). I find both these questions somewhat misplaced. In the situation of the hailing on the street, this is not the moment of the subject’s constitution out of nothing, it is a reiteration of interpellative subjectification. The issue with the mirror-phase is different from all subsequent moments of subjectification simply as it is the first one. Recall that the infans, by virtue of that word, is not yet a speaking being. It hasn’t the language to have self-consciousness in any fully-fledged state as yet. It is the moment of the mirror recognition which first gives an image to its thought, an imagine on which to hang all subsequent moments of subjectification and the place of the “I” of language. Eagleton’s problem here strikes me as a non-starter. He asks whether there is not a need for “a third, higher subject” to ground the identification (215)? There are two ways to answer this, first off the imaginary is always encompassed by the symbolic which - as the big Other - is the “third” in every language act. But in a more obvious way, there is the role of the parents, cooing away behind the infans and saying “yes, that’s my good little poopy pants, yes it is.” Which, though the child is not yet speaking, still acts as recognition on the part of the parent that the infans is on to something, i.e., that yes it is them in the mirror. Eagleton points to certain misreadings or misapplications of Lacan that Althusser is enmeshed with, the first of which is his confusion of subject with ego, and in the process losing connection to desire and producing a far more stable subject that Lacan does (216).   Althusser is also faulted for his discussion of the (capital S) Subject which Eagleton equates with the superego, but remarks that Lacan would speak of the Other (216). I left the “Subject” discussion out of my response to the ISA essay as to my mind it is part of a specific example (Christian religious ideology) and not a feature of his general theory. That said, Eagleton has a point, though in my reading Athusser’s “Subject” is not crucial to his theory and thus I saw no need to press the point. Eagleton thinks differently though and I agree with him that the Althusserian (little S) subject, voids much of the instability and the (capital S) Subject is far more determinate and authoritarian than Lacan’s Other is (its determining characteristic being the ambiguity of what it wants). Eagleton concludes (and I think quite rightly) that “Althusser’s model is a good deal too monistic, passing over the discrepant, contradictory ways ion which subjects may be ideologically accosted - partially, wholly, or not at all - by discourses which themselves form no obvious cohesive unity” (217). These are some of the issues which I had in mind when writing on the ISA essay I said that there was more to said and thought about interpellation. Ideology in Althusser becomes for Eagleton an exemplar of the expansion problem I have already written of, as it becomes “identical with lived experience” (219). He closes his discussion of Althusser with yet another definitional observation about ideology; that ideology acts as an “imaginary map” (221) for social subjects, and it is necessary because societies and social processes are simply too complex for subjects to grasp “as a whole” in their “everyday consciousness” (220).  

Pierre Bourdieu is the last thinker to be discussed in this text. The first thing to note about him is that he does not make use of the term ideology at all. His own conceptual system rather refers to habitus, doxa and field. By habitus “he means the inculcation in men and women of a set of durable dispositions which generate particular practices” (222-3). By doxa, he refers to the ideas and lived experience of the “stable, tradition-bound social order in which power is fully naturalized and unquestioned” (223). The field(s) of which he writes would be the arenas in which a particular habitus is in effect, thus we have the literary field, the economic field, etc. Habitus is thus not that far from Gramsci and Althusser in certain ways, as Eagleton describes it here, “the very spontaneity of our habitual behavior (...) reproduce(s) certain deeply tacit norms and values; and habitus is thus the relay or transmission mechanism by which mental and social structures becomes incarnate in daily social activity” (223).  What Eagleton does not discuss, but which seems worth noting is the Bourdieu’s adaptation of capital as a concept, thus he gives us symbolic capital and cultural capital and with these innovations, reads a variety of fields as economies of a sort, replete with profits and losses and much else that one associates with the economy. While I find some of what he does in this manner interesting, even fascinating (see his book, Distinction) I have some qualms about using the capitalist economic situation as a model for all social relations as it seems, in effect, to assume that it is utterly dominant in all of them and it does not take a great deal of time to come up with examples where this manner of explanation is revealed as profoundly reductive - Emily Dickinson was a poet and had some contact with the literary field, but given how she lived her life as poet - all one might be left to do is remark on what a bad business woman she was, she ought to have been struggling to obtain more poetic capital rather than wasting so much time making her little books of poems!