> "Devine, James" wrote:
>
> Sabri asks.
> > One last thing, at the risk of sounding silly: What is ideology?
> > Is one's ideology independent from the "class" one belongs to?
>
> As every teacher knows, there is no such thing as a silly question, except for the
>one unasked.[*] There are at least three definitions of ideology.
There are, I suspect, many more than three. The practice I've arrived at
is to accept the definition of whatever text I'm reading-- i.e., to
derive the meaning of "ideology" from the text, and let that meaning
control my understanding of the text. If context doesn't provide a clear
meaning for it, I read it as merely meaning "set of ideas" as far as
that text goes. To put it another way, I've resigned myself to the
impossibility of ever having a generally shared understanding of it.
In my own usage, I try to follow the usage of Barbara Jeanne Fields in
her essay, "Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America,"
New Left Review, May/June 1990. I like it because (a) it offers a fairly
clean distinction between ideology, propaganda, and theory and (b) it
enables a quite powerful explanation of the relationship between the way
people live/act and their spontaneous responses to that experience. (I
think a crude but useful reduction of her view would be that "ideology =
common sense.") Her definition seems to overlap the first and third you
offer, but does not quite coincide with either. I give the key
paragraphs below. It leaves open the question of whether, in any give
case, ideology can be equated with "false consciousness." (Incidentally,
Engels defined it as the belief that ideas have a history of their own.
That is useful, for instance, in critiquing the "history of ideas"
discipline. An immense amount of literary scholarship from, say, 1930 to
1980 made this assumption.)
Carrol
>From Barbara Jeanne Fields:
******
This is perhaps a good moment to say a few words abut what ideology is
and what it is not; because without an understanding of what ideology is
and does, how it arises and how it is sustained, there can be no
genuinely historical understanding of race. Ideology is best understood
as the descriptive vocabulary of day-to-day existencem through which
people make rough sense of the social reality that they live and create
from day to day. It is the language of consciousness that suits the
particular way in which people deal with their fellows. It is the
interpretation in thought of the social relations through which they
constantly create and re-create their collective being, in all the
varied forms their collective being may assume: family, clan, tribe,
nation, class, party, business enterprise, church, army, club, and so
on. As such, ideologies are not delusions but real, as real as the
social relations for which they stand.
Ideologies are real, but it does not follow that they are scientifically
accurate, or that they provide an analysis of social relations that
would make sense to anyone who does not take ritual part in those social
relations. Some societies (including colonial New England) have
explained troublesome relations between people as witchcraft and
possession by the devil. The explanation makes sense to those whose
daily lives produce and reproduce witchcraft, nor can any amount of
rational "evidence" disprove it. Witchcraft in such a society is as
self-evident a natural fact as race is to Richard Cohen of the
*Washington Post*. To someone looking in from outside, however,
explaining a miscarriage, a crop failure, a sudden illness, or a death
by invoking witchcraft would seem absurd, just as explaining slavery by
invoking race must seem absurd to anyone who does not ritually produce
race day in and day out as Americans do. Ideologies do not need to be
plausible, let alone persuasive, to outsiders. They do their job when
they help insiders make sense of the things they do and see--ritually,
repetitively--on a daily basis.
So much ideology is. Here is what it is not. It is not a material
entity, a thing of any sort, that you can hand down like an old garment,
pass on like a germ, spread like a rumour, or impose like a code of
dress or etiquette. Nor is it a collection of dissociated
beliefs--"attitudes" is the favoured jargon among American social
scientists and historians they have mesmerizedd--that you can extract
from their context and measure by current or retrospective survey
researh. (Someday the reification of conduct and demeanour in
"attitudes" will seem as quaint and archaic as their reification in
bodily "humours"--phlegmatic, choleric, melancholic, sanguine--does
now.) Nor is it a Frankenstein's monster that takes on a life of its
own.
Ideology is not the same as *propaganda*. Someone who said,
"Anti-slavery *ideology* infiltrated the slave quarters through illicit
abolitionist newspapers," would be talking rather about propaganda than
about ideology. The slaves' anti-slavery ideology could not be smuggled
to them in alien newsprint. People deduce and verify their ideology in
daily life. The slaves' anti-slavery ideology had to arise from their
lives in slavery and from their daily relations with slaveholders and
other members of slave society.[35] Frederick Douglass was not
propounding a paradox but speaking the simple truth when he said that
the first anti-slavery lecture he ever heard was delivered by his master
in the course of explaining to his mistress why slaves must not be
taught to read. By the same token, slaves who decided at the first shot
of the Civil War--or even earlier, with Lincoln's election--that
emancipation was finally on the nation's agenda were not responding to
prevailing Northern propaganda (which, indeed, promised nothing of the
kind at that time). It was their exprience with slaveowners, not least
the slaveowners' hysterical equation of the Republican Party with
abolition, that made slaves see Lincoln as the emancipator before he saw
himself that way. And, I might add, it was the slaves' acting on that
foreknowledge that forced Lincoln to become the emancipator.
====================================================
{35. The slaves' religion arose in the same way. In an astute and
eloquent passage, Donald G. Mathews diagnoses the error of supposing
that the slaves should or could have had a "correct" version of
Christianity by an outside agency. To argue that way, Mathews correctly
insists, presupposes that the slave could "slough off his enslavement,
ancestry, traditional ways of viewing the world, and sense of selfhood
in order to think the oppressor's thoughts after him. . . .The
description of action in which the slave is expected to remain passive
while receiving a discrete body of ideas and attitudes which exist apart
from social and cultural conditions reveals one of the most mischievous
and flawed assumptions which scholars make." *Religion in the Old
South*, Chicago, 1967, p. 187.}
====================================================
*Ideology, Propaganda and Dogma*
To insist that ideology and propaganda are not the same is not to
suppose that they are unrelated. The most successful propagandist is one
who thoroughly understands the ideology of those to be propagandized.
When propagandists for secession before the American Civil War
emphasized the danger that the Northerners might encroach upon
Southerners' right of self-determination, they emphasized a theme that
resonated as well with the world of non-slaveholders as with that of
planters, even though the two worlds differed as night from day. "We
will never be slaves" was good secessinist propaganda. "We must never
let them take our slaves" would have been poor propaganda and the
secessionists knew it; just as today "Strategic Defense Initiative"
makes a good advertisement for a weapons programme, whereas "Strategic
Offensive Initiative" or "First- Strike Initiative" would not.
Neither is ideology the same as *doctrine* or *dogma*. Pro-slavery
*doctrine* might well hold, for example, that any white person's word
must take precedence over any black person's. But the push-and-shove
reality of any planter's business would tell him or her that some
situations call for accepting a slave's word over an overseer's. [36]
After all, overseers came and went, but slaves remained; and the object
was to produce cotton or sugar or rice or tobacco, not to produce white
supremacy. The perfect subordination of the slaves to the overseer, if
coupled with poor production, would spell disaster for the planter.
Thus, the ideology of a planter--that is, the vocabulary of day-to-day
action and experience--must make room for contest and struggle (perhaps
couched in paternalistic or racist language), even if doctrine specified
an eternal hierarchy. Doctrine or dogma may be imposed, and they often
are: dissenters can be excommunicated from a church or expelled from a
party. But ideology is a distillate of experience. Where the experience
is lacking, so is the ideology that only the missing experience could
call into being. Planters in the Old South could have imposed their
understanding of the world upon the non-slaveholders or the slaves only
if they could have tranformed the lives of the non-slaveholders and
slaves into a replica of their own.
====================================================
{36. Genovese, *Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made*, New York
1974, p. 16.}
====================================================
An ideology must be constantly created and verified in social life; if
it is not, it dies, even though it may seem to be safely embodied in a
form that can be handed down. [37] Many Christians still think of
kneeling with folded hands as the appropriate posture for prayer, but
few now know why; and the few who do know cannot, even if they choose,
mean the same thing by it as was meant by those to whom the posture was
part of an ideology still real in everyday social life. The social
relations that once gave explicit reality to tht ritual gesture of the
vassal's subordination to his lord are now as dead as a mackerel, and
so, therefore, is the ideological vocabulary--including the posture of
prayer--in which those social relations once lived.
====================================================
{37. Some people imagine that ideology can indeed be handed down in the
form of law. If that were so, then the law could do without courts,
lawyers, judges and juries.}
====================================================
The foregoing line of argument raises the questin of how one group's
understanding of reality, its ideology, appears to prevail over others
when it comes to real and effective political power. Depending on who
poses the question, it is the problem of social order, of converting
power into authority, or of political hegemony. The most obvious answer
--force-- is not an answer. There is never ultimately enough force to go
around, particularly since submission is hardly ever an end in itself.
If the slaveowners had produced white supremacy without producing
cotton, their class would have perished in short order. A colonial ruler
does not just want the natives to bow down and render their obeisance to
their new sovereign. The natives must also grow food, pay taxes, go to
work in mines and estates, provide conscripts for the army, and help to
hold the line against rival powers. For these activities to proceed, the
natives must not just submit, they must cooperate. Even in those few
cases in which submission *is* an end in itself, force is never enough
in itself. Slaveholders, colonial rulers, prison guards and the Shah's
police have all had occasion to discover that when nothing remains
except force, nothing remains--period. The rule of any group, the power
of any state, rests on force in the final analysis. Anyone who gives the
least thought to the matter reaches that conclusion, and thinkers as
different in other respects as Weber, Marx, Machiavelli and Madison
would have no trouble agreeing on that. Rule always rests on force in
the last analysis. But a ruling group or state that must rely on force
in the first analysis as well is one living in a state of seige,
rebellion, war or revolution.
It will not do to suppose that a powerful group captures the hearts and
minds of the less powerful, inducing them to "internalize" the ruling
ideology (to borrow the spurious adjective-verb in which this artless
evasion has so often been couched). To suppose that is to imagine
ideology handed down like an old garment, passed on like a germ, spread
like a rumour, or imposed like a dress code. Any of these would
presuppose that an experience of social relations can be transmitted by
the same means, which is impossible.
And yet, power does somehow become authority. A red light, or the
upraised palm of a traffic policeman, brings people to stop (at least in
places where people tend to obey them) not by the exercise of
power--neither a light nor a hand can stop a moving automobile--but by
the exercise of authority. Why? Not, surely, because everyone shares a
belief, an "attiude," about the sanctity of the law, or holds the same
conception of a citizen's duty. Many citizens who would unhesitatingly
stop for a red light, even at a deserted intersection at 2:00 a.m.,
would painstakingly calculate the relative cost and benefit of breaking
laws against environmental pollution, insider-trading of securities, or
failing to report income to the Internal Revenue Service, and then obey
or violate the law according to how the calculation worked out.
It is not an abstract belief or attitude that brings people to stop at a
red light. Rather, people discover the advantage of being able to take
for granted what eveyone else will do at a busy intersection. Or, to be
more exact, they have grown up in a society that constantly ritualizes
that discovery--by making people stp again and again for red
lights--without each person having to make the discovery anew by ad hoc
calculation at every intersection. Both parts are necessary: the
demonstrable advantage of stopping and the constant re-enactment that
removes the matter from the realm of calculation to that of routine. The
ritual repetition of the appropriate social behaviour makes for the
continuity of ideology, not the "handing down" of the appropriate
"attitudes." There, too, lies the key to why people may suddenly appear
to slough off an ideology to which they had appeared subservient.
Ideology is not a set of attitudes that people can "have" as they have a
cold, and throw off the same way. Human beings live in human societies
by negotiating a certain social terrain, whose map they keep alive in
their minds by the collective, ritual repetition of the activities they
must carry out in order to negotiate the terrain. If the terrain
changes, so must their activities, and therefore so must the map.
*Shaping the Terrain*
Let me pursue a bit further this analogy of terrain. But imagine a
physical landscape: trees here, a river there, mountains, valleys,
quicksand, desert and so on. And imagine an observer at the altitude of
an earth satellite, who for some reason can follow the paths of people
over the terrain but cannot see the details of the landscape. The
observer sees people tunneling under, climbing over, jogging to left or
right, moving with odd swimming motions, even disappearing
unceremoniously into the quicksand Given a modicum of training in the
orthodox tradition of American history, he might conclude that people in
this part of the landscape have "attitudes" calling for one kind of
movement, while people in that part have "attitudes" calling for another
kind--all of these "attitudes" possessing a "life of their own." Given a
modicum of wisdom, he would realize that the key to understanding the
people's movements is to analyse the terrain.
Therein, also, lies the key to understanding how one group acquires
authority, imposes order, or achieves hegemony. Exercising rule means
being able to shape the terrain. Suppose that the ruling group wants
everyone in our landscape to move east, and therefore starts fires in
the forests to the west. Mission accomplished: everybody moves east.
Because they all share a conviction -- an "attitude" -- glorifying the
virtues of easterly movement? Not necessarily. All that order,
authority, hegemony requires is that the interest of the mass in not
getting burned alive should intersect the interest of the rulers in
moving everyone to the east. If easterly movement subsequently becomes
part of the routine by which masses organize their lives independently
of the rulers so that such movement becomes part of a constantly
repeated social routine, a vocabulary will soon enough explain to the
masses --not analytically, but descriptively -- what easterly movement
means. And that vocabulary need not and cannot be a duplicate of the one
spoken by the rulers.
Racial ideology supplied the means of explaining slavery to people whose
terrasin was a republic founded on radical doctrines of liberty and
natural rights; and, more important, a republic in which those doctrines
seemed to represent accurately the world in which all but a minority
lived. Only when the denial of liberty became an anomaly apparent even
to the least observant and reflective members of Euro-American society
did ideology systematically explain the anomaly. But slavery got along
for a hundred years after its establishment without race as its
ideological rationale. The reason is simple. Race explained why some
people could rightly be denied what others took for granted: namely,
liberty, supposedly a self-evident gift of nature's God. But there was
nothing to explain until most people could, in fact, take liberty for
granted -- as the indentured servants and disfranchised freedmen of
colonial America could not. Nor was there anything calling for a radical
explanation where everyone in society stood in relation of inherited
subordination to someone else: servant to master, serf to nobleman,
vassal to overlord, overlord to king, king to the King of Kings and Lord
of Lords.
It was not Afro-Americans, furthermore, who needed a racial explanation;
it was not they who invented themselves as a race. Euro-Americans
resolved the contradiction between slavery and liberty by defining
Afro-Americans as a race; Afro-Americans resolved the contradiction more
straightforwardly by calling for the abolition of slavery. From the era
of the American, French and Haitian revolutions on, they claimed liberty
as theirs by natural right. [38] They did not originate the large
nineteenth-century literature purporting to prove their biological
inferiority, nor, by and large, did they accept it. Vocabulary can be
very deceptive. Both Afro- and Euro-Americans used the words that today
denote race, but they did not understand those words the same way. Afro-
Americans understood the reason for their enslavement to be, as
Frederick Douglass put it, "not *color*, but *crime*." Afro-Americans
invented themselves, not as a race, but as a nation. They were not
troubled, as modern scholars often are, by the use of racial vocabulary
to express their sense of nationality. Afro-American soldiers who
petitioned on behalf of "These poor nation of colour" and "we Poore
Nation of a Colered rast [race]" saw nothing incongruous about the
language. Racial ideology in its radical American form is the ideology
to be expected in a society in which enslavement stands as an exception
to a radically defined liberty so commonplace that no great effort of
imagination is required to take it for granted. It is the ideology
proper to a "free" society in which enslaved descendants of Africans are
an anomalous exception. There is no paradox; it makes good, common
sense. Indeed, dare I go further. In the wake of the American
Revolution, racial ideology assumed its greatest importance in the free,
bourgeois society of the Norther states, where both slavery and the
presence of Afro-Americans became increasingly minor exceptions. [41]
The paroxysm of racial violence that convulsed the South during the
years after emancipation, and the ever more detailed legal codification
of racial proscription, represent the nationalization of race, an
ideology that described the bourgeois North much better than it did the
slave South. *****
