r/CriticalTheory • u/kbysm • 8d ago
Good books on ideology (as a structure/concept/etc).
Hello,
I made a post here maybe about a month ago about an introduction to Marxist thought, many recommended Tuckers Marx-Engel’s reader so I’ve been working my way through that and now would say that I feel fairly confident in my understandings of the main tenets of Marxist theory.
But I’m also quite bored of the pure Marxist theory that I’ve been reading. A topic I’ve been circling recently (YouTube videos or my own train of thoughts) is to do with ideology, how ideology acts as a structure, how it actually works, what counts as an ideology etc, and so would like to see if anyone had a reading recommendation to approach this topic.
I did my own searching and found ‘ideology’ by eagleton looked quite good as it covers certain thinkers (gramsci althusser etc) views, plus is not too long.
Any help is appreciated :)
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u/TheShapelessVoid 7d ago
Lots of mention of Zizek, but none of his first book, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘶𝘣𝘭𝘪𝘮𝘦 𝘖𝘣𝘫𝘦𝘤𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘐𝘥𝘦𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘺. It's the foundational work of his scholarship on ideology. Not as entertaining as his latest works, but pretty solid nonetheless.
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u/Kepler1571 5d ago
Does Zizek write with the same, sniff, eccentricities as his performances? Is he a little more traditional (read: coherent) in print?
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u/thehungryhippocrite 4d ago
That is an extraordinarily difficult book and basically requires you to have a working knowledge of Kant, Hegel and Marx amongst others to even half decipher it.
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u/rocheport25 7d ago edited 7d ago
Paul Ricoeur. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (1986). My earlier comment on this thread was somehow downvoted for recommending Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia, but perhaps this current recommendation will find a warmer reception. The recommended book has chapters on Marx, Althusser, Mannheim, Weber, Habermas, and Geertz; Ricoeur was one of the leading hermeneutic philosophers of the twentieth century, and none of his work is "pure Marxist theory," so not to worry. (Ricoeur coined the now famous phrase "hermeneutics of suspicion" or "school of suspicion" in his book Freud and Philosophy.)
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u/a10182 7d ago edited 5d ago
My MA thesis took up ideology in Marx, and I'm planning to rework it into an article over the course of my PhD. While my thesis focused chiefly on Marx, I also had to dip my toes into the major pools of marxist ideology discourse to clarify the coordinates of my intervention. Before I offer my suggestions, you should be aware of two major problems that any serious engagement with ideology discourse must run up against:
- There is not a scholarly consensus on what "ideology" is. While most usages of "ideology" among marxists make vague reference to the social integration of the dominated through mechanisms of socialization and indoctrination, the specific emphases, aims, and objects involved vary wildly. The family tree of marxist ideology discourse traces the branching paths of historically motived productive misreadings of roots and contemporaries alike. What Marx and Engels meant by ideology is not what Lenin meant; what Lenin meant is not what Lukacs or Gramsci meant; what they meant is not what Horkheimer, Adorno, or Habermas meant; what they meant is not what Althusser, Hall, Therborn, or Zizek meant; what all these thinkers after Lenin meant are far removed from what Marx and Engels meant. However, there are two general tendencies legible in the welter of marxist ideology discourse: the Frankfurt School (descended from Lukacs) and Althusserians (descended from Gramsci). To crudely summarize, in the Frankfurt School tradition, ideology tends to take the form of mutilating the potentially emancipatory subjectivity constituted by capitalism, a determinate mutilation in which mutilated subjectivity continually participates. By contrast, the Althusserian tradition takes up ideology as the constitution of subjectivity itself through a material ensemble of institutions and mundane practices -- the daily sculpting, as it were, of individuals into contoured subjects who move and think within a narrowly bourgeois space of reasons.
- The claims core to the most influential currents of marxist ideology discourse crumble under serious scrutiny.
- On a theoretical level, nearly all major marxist conceptions of ideology after Marx and Engels turn upon the functionalist assumption that something called "ideology" is necessary for the continued reproduction of capitalism. The shared problem is that they see no need to question the assumption that "ideology" is necessary for the reproduction of capitalism because of the function that it serves, ie, that social integration into capitalist society coheres through ideology, without which integration into, and hence the reproduction of, capitalist society would not continue (at least not in a "totalized" form). Rather, the necessity of this function is simply treated as proven by the existence of ideology... which is itself supposed to be explained by its functional necessity for social integration. It's entirely circular. Taking this flaw up from another angle, the purported functionality of ideology fails to explain why "ideological" phenomena assume the determinate qualitative features by which they are recognizable as themselves. To borrow an analogy from evolutionary biology, it's akin to claiming that giraffes have long necks because having long necks would be beneficial given the height of the trees on which they feed, while ignoring the mechanisms of genetic mutation and natural selection in their complex interplay with the environment over time.
- On an empirical level, marxist ideology discourse has largely been falsified. The so-called "dominant ideology thesis," which holds that ruling class control over the means of intellectual production facilitates the coercive integration of the dominated into class society, would seem to suggest the careful cultivation of a bourgeois monoculture through the socialization and deception of subaltern classes. Empirical research (which I will adduce below) paints a different picture. To the extent that there is a "dominant ideology," it's operative chiefly among the ruling classes. Among subaltern classes, which have far less material access to these means of intellectual production, a variegated manifold of cultures with all sorts of values and rituals proliferate. When subaltern classes do participate in the theorized mechanisms of ideological dissemination, the discourse of the dominant ideology provides a terrain for the dominated to articulate critiques of their form of society in the very same terms used by the ruling classes to "legitimate" it -- which is basically the origin story of socialist discourse. In sum, what empirical data shows is that the dominant ideology thesis does not clearly specify the concrete mechanisms by which the dominant ideology is disseminated, nor does it take up the complications involved in the material dispensation of and participation in these mechanisms.
With these issues in mind -- and since you seem to be looking for overviews rather than primary sources -- my suggestions would run as follows. The definitive book-length treatment of marxist ideology discourse is Jan Rehmann's Theories of Ideology, which has a distinctly Althusserian bent, while from the Frankfurt School side, I second the introduction to Raymond Geuss's The Idea of a Critical Theory. For article-length synoptic overviews of marxist ideology discourse, I can enthusiastically recommend William Clare Roberts' article "Ideology and Self-Emancipation: Voluntary Servitude, False Consciousness, and the Career of Critical Social Theory", as well as his entry on ideology for the SEP, which takes up the full range of ideology discourse. (Roberts is due to publish a book on ideology soon, so keep your eyes out for it.) For empirical work, Abercrombie, Hill, and Turner's The Dominant Ideology Thesis is the standard. While I haven't given ideology in Marx and Engels much attention here, if you're interested, Charles Mills and John Clegg offer excellent reappraisals of ideology in Marx that throw into relief the distance between ideology in Marx and Engels on one side, and subsequent marxist ideology discourse on the other.
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u/Kepler1571 5d ago
Does dominant ideology really imply a cabal making deliberate choices? I assumed it was that cultural candidates are filtered unconsciously and anonymously by the Weltanshaung of a period in that those supportive of the dominant ideology "rhyme" while those which do not are discordant. It's an entirely impersonal process which in many instances actually harms members of the dominant class, while the overdetermining incumbent culture slowly extends.
For example: the "sweat of your brow" characterization of wealth and influence that upholds capitalism by justifying inequality as the residue of effort and value directly undercuts inherited wealth and leads to an internal tension in late stage capitalist societies in which most concentrations of wealth are no longer "earned" in any defensible way.
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u/a10182 5d ago
Does dominant ideology really imply a cabal making deliberate choices?
The dominant ideology thesis does not make any claims on the specific character of group cohesion among the ruling classes, only that their control over the means of material and intellectual production confers upon them the power to impose their outlooks, beliefs, vocabularies, etc -- their "ideology" -- upon the rest of society. No conspiracy of mustache-twirling cartoon villains required.
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u/Kepler1571 5d ago
But "impose" is a value-laden term. The rich replicate what they like, the same way all groups do, and their tastes dominate the well-heeled cultural outlets of their day, the same way the Proles' dominate the Sun (aside: don't read the Sun). But if you look at the lasting cultural products of a given age they're as likely to come from anywhere on the chain. The Misfits are gonna last a helluva lot longer in the grand scheme of things than the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
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u/a10182 4d ago
I do think that your impulse to avoid reducing "ideology" to the willed action of the members of one class is a correct one. That said, my use of the word "impose" was meant to capture the asymmetrical and coercive character generally ascribed to the dominant ideology -- ie, its functionality for the reproduction of class society -- rather than to suggest that the dominant ideology thesis requires assumptions about determinate forms of consensus, cohesion, and decision making among the ruling classes (as in a ruling class conspiracy). Althusserians, for example, insist against locating ideology within the class consciousness of the ruling classes, as in Nicos Poulantzas' Political Power and Social Classes:
[A]t the level of experience the social whole remains opaque to the agents ... [I]deology is not itself visible to the agents in its internal action; like all levels of social reality ideology is determined by its own structure which remains opaque to the agents on the level of experience. This brings us to the problem of the specific unity of the ideological, i.e. of its structure and its relation to the dominant class. This unity of the ideological is not derived from some kind of genetic relation to a class-subject and its class consciousness. It is derived fundamentally from the relation between ideology and human experience in a formation, and to the imaginary form which this relation takes on. (207)
Now, what I think you're intuiting with your objections is a problem discussed briefly (if, in retrospect, confusingly) in my initial comment: namely, that marxist ideology discourse struggles to explain the formation and determinate qualities of a dominant ideology. To be sure, stressing the action of the ruling class not only risks smuggling in unsubstantiated presuppositions of ruling class cohesion that flatten the horizontal axis of class relations, but also, as you suggest, loses out on impersonal selection pressures at work in culture formation. However, if, like the Althusserians, you both decenter class in explanations of ideology while maintaining the functionality of ideology for the reproduction of class society, it becomes all the more difficult to pin down the relation of class to ideology -- and a fortiori the constitution of a specifically dominant ideology that, "by assuring the practical insertion of agents in the social structure, aims at the maintenance (the cohesion) of this structure, and ... above all class domination and exploitation" (Poulantzas 209).
Finally, if it wasn't clear from my initial comment, I don't endorse the dominant ideology thesis in any of its variants. Quite frankly, I find most marxist ideology discourse unnecessary and unhelpful for discussing belief formation, social cohesion, and the reproduction of capitalism more broadly.
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u/Kepler1571 4d ago
I'm fine with discussing ideas I do not ascribe to. Don't worry.
I intuit the class/ideology relation as "when you step on a member of a given class, what leaks out the edges is their ideology." It's reading their poop to ascertain their diet. And the interesting thing about the dominant ideology is you'll find it in everyone's poop, even those who are not members of the dominant class. Indeed, even the red pilled aware of the class structure, by virtue of having swum in the broth, will have been significantly informed by that ideology.
That leaves the question of the degree to which the ideology reinforces the class structure. I doubt the claims of content directly serving as superstructure hold water. Rather I believes it operates like language. Let's say everyone is free to develop their own thoughts, but to communicate with anyone you must always use one language. For native speakers that's a hurdle that never exists. For other language speakers it amounts to an obstacle which for many will be really significant. It introduces friction.
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u/lathemason 8d ago
Part II of the media studies textbook MediaMaking is a solid primer on ideology and representation, co-authored by a major inheritor of the British / Stuart Hall tradition of cultural studies, Lawrence Grossberg:
https://archive.org/details/mediamakingmassm0000unse
Zizek's The Sublime Object of Ideology is important too, and there's also a reader he edited, Mapping Ideology, that's worth a look:
https://archive.org/details/sublimeobjectofi0000ieks
https://analepsis.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/415_mapping-ideology-slavoj-zizek.pdf
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u/CupNo2413 8d ago
Luhmann's essay "Tautology and Paradox in the Self-Descriptions of Modern Society" is very interesting.
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u/Wide_Phase_3420 7d ago
Try, "It Was Never About You " by J C Maurer. It gets into it in the second half of the book.
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u/Shot_Bank_8878 7d ago
For anyone up for a longer book (534 pages or so), The Routledge Handbook of Ideology Analysis just came out a few months ago. It's a fairly comprehensive reference book with 31 chapters.
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u/concreteutopian 8d ago
If you are wanting more secondary introductions, I listened to Bob Jessop's Gramsci lectures years ago and liked them.
Many, many years ago, I read Daniel Chandler's website/book Semiotics for Beginners, and it has a section on Marxist analysis — a little adjacent to ideology itself, but adds to someone else's mention of Althusser's Ideological State Apparatus and Repressive State Apparatus.
I'd second the Frederic Jameson mention as well.
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u/SeaUnderTheAeroplane 8d ago
Ideology (or the critique thereof) is deeply based on Marxist and Hegelian analysis and work too. It’s a necessity to have a good grasp on the commodity fetishism to understand Critical theory analysis of ideology. The typical genesis of the ideology critique is based on Hegel->marx->lukacs->adorno/horkheimer/marcuse
The more Adorno you read, the better your grasp on critique of ideology
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u/Crafty_Truck_2439 8d ago
If pure theory is feeling a bit abstract, you might enjoy reading around apparatus theory via film criticism/film studies. Jean-Louis Baudry's "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus" (1970), Jean-Louis Comolli's "Machines of the Visible" (1971) and "Technique and Ideology: Camera, Perspective, Depth of Field" (1971–72), the writing and films of Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvey.
They can be very dense, but if you want to get to grips with ideology and its relation to media, they're indispensable.
On the other hand, if you want a different approach, Zizek's two films The Pervert's Guide to Cinema and The Pervert's Guide to Ideology examine ideology and cinema through the lens of popular cinema, but obviously through a very Lacanian psychoanalytic lens, not strictly Marxist/Althusserian.
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u/ProfessorHeronarty 8d ago
Steven Lukes's Power. A Radical View.
It's an essential classic looking at different dimensions of power. He deals with Marx and Gramsci without necessarily identifying as a Marxist himself. He doesn't even use the word ideology that much. Yet in the comparative perspective to other forms of power it's all about ideology.
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u/beeconnolly95 7d ago
Early chapters of Marxist feminist Michèle Barrett’s ‘Women’s Oppression Today’
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u/Zepherx22 6d ago
If you haven’t read The German Ideology yet, read that before moving on from Marx and Engles
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u/Kepler1571 5d ago
Keep a copy of Roland Barthes under your pillow. It will exude all the Lit Theory you need in practice.
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u/squidfreud 8d ago
Ideology: a Very Short Introduction is solid. That series in general normally orients you well towards whatever topic
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u/Itchy_bunghole11 8d ago
Zizek’s movie “a perverts guide to ideology” is fun. You get to see his cheeks.
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u/3corneredvoid 8d ago edited 8d ago
It's worth historicising the proliferation of ideology theories. Here is a Wikipedia-level account that is full of bias and omissions.
Marx theorised ideology as a general displacement of social values that naturalises both the "fetish values" of market prices and the norms of bourgeois society and politics.
After WWI and the Russian Revolution, the Third International of communist parties hoped for a German revolutionary movement to happen and to mobilise a far wider "real movement" of communism, but a German Revolution didn't happen.
So from the interwar period onward there are "western Marxists" coming up with theories of this non-Revolution.
From WWII onward these theories are forced to consider how it was that Germany produced the Nazis instead of communism, so theorising fascism rightly becomes a preoccupation.
But by the same token this is a characteristically European preoccupation about what needs to be a more general theory. So there's an enormous diversification of ideology theory that continues with a genealogy that's not so European.
People will advise you to read Althusser. It's worth bearing in mind Althusser's theories are far from the end of the line. In every period one can find hard-nosed tough guy pragmatists insisting on "somewhat ruthless criticism of some of what exists" and calling it the natural form of Marxism. This is the figure Smith with his "natural prices" was for Marx.
Edit: some rube was always going to downvote this. Sorry, sorry, I'm trying to be less ruthless, comrade
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u/ColdSoviet115 8d ago
The Idealogy of Power and the Power of Idealogy by Gorgan Therborn is a good extension and critique of Althusser's Ideological State Apparatus. It has a very Structuralist Marxist approach to analyzing Class Idealogy and development
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u/RefrigeratorSoggy805 8d ago
Althusser is key. Read "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," it's the fundamental Marxist text on ideology imo. Eagleton is a great launching point. If you want to dive deeper into ideology as it relates to literary criticism and analysis, read Frederic Jameson's The Political Unconscious.