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
