10 Key concepts In cultural studies

10. Key concepts In cultural studies
In ordinary conversation, to claim that someone is speaking ideologically usually is meant to suggest that the person speaking has a skewed view of things distorted by a set of rigid pre-conceptions. From the perspective of critical theory, the concept of ideology has been developed, discussed and debated by multiple thinkers over the course of the last two centuries. The term ideology was originally coined at the end of the eighteenth century by the French philosopher Destutt de Trace and was meant to connote the science of the realm of ideas. Such a science would study the human mind and analyze human perception. Over the 19th century Karl Marx engaged consciously with the concept of ideology and transformed the concept to refer to the social determination of ideas by material conditions. Karl Marx’s conception of ideology was one of the most influential and over the 20th century a diverse set of thinkers engaged critiqued and modified Marx’s conception. There is however no consensus about what the concept of ideology means in contemporary critical discourses. This module will try to trace the development of the concept of ideology first from within the Marxist tradition through to the linguistic turn in the concept in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Karl Marx’s and the classical Marxist conceptualization of ideology It is difficult to distill Marx’s concept of ideology because he transformed his ideas substantially throughout his life. Moreover, some of the ideas in Marx’s later works (Das Capital) contradict ideas in his earlier work (the German Ideology). In this section I will discuss some of the common themes that runs through Marx’s notion of ideology and which were borrowed by other classical Marxist thinkers like Lenin, Lukacs, Adorno etc. Marx crucial intervention in the conception of ideology was that he believed that ideas were determined by the material conditions under which they are produced. The idea that all men are equal in the eyes of the law seems obvious in modern times, but would be considered irrational in feudal society. Marx’s materialist conception of ideas was in deliberate contrast to the Hegelian notion that ideas determine reality. Marx inverted Hegel’s philosophy to propound a materialist theory of history, which postulates that the material conditions of a society determine social reality and human consciousness about this reality. Marx’s dedicated his life to understand the structure of capitalist society. His main thesis was that society is controlled by the class which controls the means of production. Hence, capitalist society is ruled by the capitalist class which dominates the sphere of production. He defined ideology as those ideas which helped buttress the rule of the dominated classes. Marx theorized that the structure of any society can be divided into two strata’s: The economic base which includes the goods and services produced by a society and the relationship men/women enter to produce these goods. The economic base is dominated by the class which controls the means of production. The superstructure is considered the realm of ideas and cultural intermediaries through which these ideas are transmitted. These include religious institutions, legal institutions, arts and literature, educational institutions etc. Marx believed that the role of the above super-structural forces was to legitimize the relations of domination existing in the base. In Feudal society, the feudal/ monarchial class controlled land and dominated the peasant class working in agricultural fields. Churches played a vital role in feudal society to legitimize the power of the feudal/monarchial class. In capitalist society the capitalist class control factories and means of production and dominate the working class. The state, constitution and legal apparatus legitimized the domination and control of the capitalist class. Marx notion of ideology implies a degree of mystification or what Marx commonly referred to as false consciousness. For Marx ideology acted as a screen to mask the conditions of reality, to deceive the dominated classes about their conditions of existence. This model depends on a distinction between appearances which are ideologically constructed and ‘reality’ which refers to the state of affairs as they are. Thus, according to Marx, the wage contract for workers were ideologically constructed to be an equal exchange of money for labor, even though Marx shows in detail how capitalists’ use the wage contract to exploit and siphon of surplus produced by workers. Similarly, Marx conceptualized the notion of commodity fetishism to indicate the ideological construction of commodities in capitalist societies. That is men/women mistake their relationship with people as a relationship between things. For example when a person desires and buys a commodity like a car or television, he/she fails to recognize the different processes of lab...