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The Westem Marxist Concept of Ideology Critique

Profile image of Ronald StricklandRonald Strickland

Abstract

Louis Althusser's essay, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses", which appeared English in 1971 as a chapter in his book entitled Lenin and Philosophy, reinvigorated Marxist literary criticism in the West. Before Althusser's essay was published, most Western critics held the. Hegelian view that ideas (including those expressed in literature) drive historical change. Traditional Marxist criticism presented the opposing view. Following the Marxist understanding of base and superstructure, it was assumed that the economic conditions and relations of production (base) were simply refl ected in cultural phenomena such as literature (superstructure). Literature, in this view, was inevitably an expression of ideological "false consciousness" supporting oppressive political and economic relations. But Marx himself suggested that the simple "reflection" role was not adequate. If the Greek tragedies of Sophocles were simple reflections of the economic conditions of ancient Greece, he asked, why were they still popular? Building on Marx's materialist account of language and consciousness, Althusser makes two significant advances over the traditional understanding of ideology. First, he rejects as an oversimplification the concept of ideology as merely false consciousness. For Althusser, there is no unmediated access to truth; all consciousness is constituted by and necessarily inscnbed within ideology. Second, for Althusser, there is no clear dividing line between base and superstructure. Ideology effectively "produces" social subjectivities and mediates the subject's experience of reality. On the one hand, this theory points to openings for revolutionary change. Since it is a corruptible material phenomenon, the superstructure can never perfectly reflect the base. On the other hand, since language and consciousness are material products, phenomena such as literature have real material effects. Ideology can be a "soft" insidious extension of the power of a repressive state apparatus. Constant, vigilant critique of ideology is required in order to resist reactionary tendencies and promote emancipatory revolution.

Key takeaways

  • But first, I will summarize the tradition of Marxist thought on ideology leading up to Althusser. "Ideology" was a relatively new word when Marx and Engels used it in The German Ideology in the 1840s.
  • Althusser's essay "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" makes two significant advances over the traditional Marxist understanding of ideology.
  • Drawing on the work of Bakhtin, Halliday, Pecheux, and Foucault, Frow theorizes a concept of ideology in semiotic terms: " .. .ideology is thought as a state of discourse rather than an inherent quality ( a truth status or a particular thematic structure); it is defined in terms of its appropriation by a hegemonic class, but because language is the point of intersection of a network of power relations this involves no necessary, motivated, or stable class correlations; and utterances are thought of as being governed by the structures of the genre of discourse and the discursive formation, structures which are more or less specific and which delimit certain possibilities of use and certain semantic domains.
  • Frow, in fact, asserts that literature functions on a meta-interpretive plane: " ... the possibility of discursive contradiction or resistance means that literary discourse can be thought of as metadiscourse which is continuous with and yet capable of a limited reflexive distance from the discourses it works ( although the conditions of this working are themselves not external to power)... theorizing the relation between ideology and discourse in this way also allows us to think the movement of the literary system (its production and reception) in terms of reaction and discontinuity rather than in terms of a correspondence or homology between literary discourse and social structure" (100).
  • But the concept of ideology critique also acknowledges the specific subjectivity of the critic.

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