IDEOLOGY

Ideology is a worldview, or a kind of story about the way things are. It is like the filter through which we experience the world. We all have such filters, but sometimes we are not conscious of them. And all filters distort. Thus we see a “lie experienced as truth” (Zizek, 1989, p. 29). And we can’t take off the rose-colored glasses very well. What new idea will we convert to that will give us unmitigated truth?

This study of ideology begins with Marxism. Marxism is concerned with the mystery of why an unfair economic system that hurts people, especially the poor, survives. The mystery for Marx (1998/1845) is that the poor believe that the system which hurts them helps them. Even if we argue with Marxism’s account of the unfairness of capitalism, surely there are things in our experience which have a similar kind of mystery. Why do people accept things which are bad for them and think they are good?

Some Marxists argued that our worldviews are a kind of “false consciousness” created by the social order (see Eagleton, 1991). Ideology is what they called a “Superstructure” totally determined by the “Base,” in this case, the economics of society. So a capitalist society will have a culture and a dominant set of ideas that are defined by it, and the same thing for communist societies, etc.

We can expand this notion and think of any number of “Bases,” or foundations, which seem to guide or determine our beliefs in a detrimental fashion. The ongoing critique from Naomi Wolf (2002) and others about the negative body image effects of stick-thin models is one. Therapist Franz Fanon (1994/1952) reports, in his book, Black Skin, White Masks, about Algerian patients who came to see him when the country was under French colonial occupation. Some of his African patients were literally trying to destroy their faces and the “blackness” they saw on them, they had internalized the racism to such a strong degree.

Yet, all of Algeria was not Fanon’s patient. You can’t say something as simple as Cosmo causes eating disorders. Ideology is not uniformly produced by the base.

Indeed, even if we were to look at, say, educational programming, the kind that has a “positive social message” like Sesame Street, or a religious message, like VeggieTales, it would naïve to assume that all the kids who watch those shows have exactly the same degree of learning to, say, share or listen to God.

This is where we get to French Marxist Louis Althusser's (1971) idea of overdetermination. This is a revision of the idea of the base and superstructure. The relationship between the two is much more interactive. Although for Althusser the superstructure is generally still caused by the base, recent theorists have suggested that perhaps it might work both ways. Perhaps we can generate positive ideologies which will change the base. Isn't that the idea behind most revolutions?

Central to Althusser's idea of overdetermination is a revision of the base-superstructure formula. He inserts a third term, ideological state apparatuses (ISAs): base-ISAs-superstructure. ISAs are institutions which mediate between the base and the superstructure. They teach us the ideology of a society. These institutions include school, the family, church, work, the media and other things.

For example, all of these institutions told you to work hard. Why? So that you can succeed? Are you Generation X or Y slacker enough to have doubts about the value of hard work? Are you a fan of The Office? Hard work sometimes gets you ahead, but often it does just the opposite (especially if you have the kind of boss who doesn't want to be told when they are doing things incorrectly or inefficiently). So let's say you work as a manual typesetter (dropping individual blocks with letters into the newspaper presses). They did this until very recently in the newspapers in England. They have had automated and, now, computer typesetting for decades. No matter how hard you work the machines will always be more efficient. If you work extra hard or extra lazy, it doesn't matter. You'll still be replaced. Obviously if you slack off entirely you'll get canned, but that would happen under any economic system.

You work hard because you were indoctrinated to do so. There are people who refuse to believe artificial sweetener causes cancer because of the conflicting studies (and who knows - it may not have any adverse effects at all). But we all accept that if you work hard you'll get ahead without ever having seen much reliable data that proves it is so. If you think about the number of crappy bosses out there, we have ample evidence that the opposite is the case. And if you just happen to be not white or not male or not heterosexual or not under fifty the falsity of the "work hard and get ahead" ideal has probably been revealed to you a long time ago.

Ideological state apparatuses are designed to teach you the messages the economic base that supports their existence requires them to make. Althusser uses an evocative phrase to explain how they work. ISAs interpellate you. In other words, they "hail" you, like you'd hail a cab. They position you by naming you and describing the world for you. If you are a woman who walks past the stereotypical construction workers who whistle and call you "baby," you have been hailed. For them, you have been reduced to nothing but a sex object. Of course, you can (usually) just keep walking or ignore them and go on with your day, but these are part of a short list of predetermined options that are the only things that make “sense” as a response. When an ISA hails you, it may not completely determine your beliefs or actions, but it is usually too powerful to ignore.

Think about the impact if an elementary teacher ever told you that you were stupid. And you might not even agree. But it will unconsciously affect you. If your family was like mine you may have been taught racism before you even understood what races were. You were almost programmed before you ever got a chance to understand and resist. Because it often happens under the radar like this, critics say one of ideology’s functions is mystification, or the shadowing of the origins of the idea (see Kellner, 1998). If we don’t know where we got an idea, we can just claim it is our own. I thought of it. No one gave that idea to me. Leave me alone. This provides powerful inertia against ideological change.

So ISAs take up the slack and discipline us into the society. When they fail the repressive state apparatus takes over and keeps us in line (typically this is the police or the assistant principal or dad’s woodshed). But things are a bit more complicated. By adding a third term to the equation, Althusser opens up the possibility that we might not be completely hailed or taught. Perhaps ideology operates in a more complex way.

Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1971) offers us another version of how ideology works. He sees social power as being in more of a process than Marx does. Instead of us all being under the falsely conscious thumb of the ruling class, we are persuaded to buy into their version of the world. There is a struggle for meaning called hegemony. The ruling class of capitalists has the upper hand, but the most efficient means of control is to get people to agree. Sometimes this is done by indoctrinating them in the ISAs. But if this doesn't work there needs to be some kind of persuasion of the masses. In this hegemonic struggle, concessions are often made to the interests of the oppressed classes to get them to buy into the whole thing. So perhaps something like profit sharing comes along to make you feel better about your job. Maybe they put more black faces on TV. They are still only the supporting cast and might act like stereotypes, but if they are there things must be working, right?

Hegemony is the organization of consent. It is a way of getting people to agree. It is a way of persuading people to see the way things are as "common sense." If you ever think that that's just the way things are, the way things have to be, then you have been persuaded by some form of hegemony. You begin to think that, of course, there always has to be a boss to report to. Of course people will always be greedy. Of course blah blah blah.

This points to another of ideology’s functions, naturalization (Barthes, 1973). Especially if the origins of an idea are mystified, it is easy to position an ideology as a common sense, realistic look at the world. We believe it because we can find evidence for it, the way nonrepresentative samples of skull shapes once were used as “evidence” of criminal proclivities. If we can say about capitalism things like, “People are just naturally greedy,” it provides strong naturalizing inertia against ideological change. And it does it in the hegemonic guise of reasonability.

There is some optimism, though. If the hegemony must make concessions to get you to agree to its ideology, that seems to open up spaces for resistance. Change might happen. Very slowly, but it might happen. To return to a previous example, if people are losing faith in the hard work = success formula, that would be a problem for a capitalist system. Perhaps doubters are saying that the only people who succeed are those in the right place at the right time. The hegemonic struggle will incorporate that into its ideology. To succeed you must also work hard to find the right place and time. Or, failing that, you should always work hard, because, who knows, the right place and right time might come along when you least expect it.

Certainly all of these messages might be to some extent true. That helps their status as common sense. All truths are not equal and most truths serve some other purpose: just look to dueling expert testimonies in the courtroom for an example of that.

Hennessy (1993) develops the work of many thinkers in explaining how the idea of articulation works within the hegemonic system: “The values and norms a hegemonic formation enforces are the result of the way in which elements from various contesting discourses are drawn into a coherent frame of intelligibility” (p. 76). So in hegemony, it is not just that the dominant forces in society use culture to get us all to agree. That is part of it. But really it is a kludging together or stuff that doesn't quite make sense and acting as if it does. For example, most Americans believe that capitalism should be as unfettered as possible. Most Americans also believe that Christianity is true and that our social values and order should be based on our heritage as a “Christian nation.” Yet, according to Jesus in Matthew 6:24, you cannot serve both. How do we learn the resolution to this contradiction in our society?

As a final bit of potential optimism, Laclau and Mouffe (1985) argue that all such articulations leave a “suture,” like in surgery. It leaves a scar and that scar can be opened. For those two revolutionaries, the process of hegemony explains why there is occasional social change. Someone levers those things open. Arguably, Martin Luther King, Jr. is successful In the civil rights movement because he exploits the tension between racism and Christianity in his speeches and forces people to break open the sutures with their violent responses to his nonviolent protests.

This leads us to some more recent visions of how ideology and hegemony operate. John Fiske (1986), obviously influenced by postmodernism, takes this idea of hegemony's concessions to the next level. He argues that all texts display polysemy. This is defined as a kind of inevitable openness. There are all sorts of meanings in a text. It is impossible to foreclose the potential meanings of a text. People might interpret it in all sorts of ways antithetical to the ideology under which it was composed. His best example is the film Die Hard. He showed this story of a Reaganite working class hero who puts his woman and the invading Japanese and Germans in their places to homeless men. These men, many of whom had recently lost their jobs or had been laid off, rooted for the terrorist bad guys because they were stealing from the kinds of people who had put them out of work.

Celeste Condit (1989), however, thinks this is a bit too optimistic. She argues that polyvalence is what characterizes texts. They are not completely open. Everyone agrees that at a certain point Bruce Willis gets glass in his feet, shoots a gun, drops a dead body onto a cop car. But we might disagree about the implications of that or our interpretations of what we just saw. Even if we root for Hans, we know he is supposed to be the bad guy. The film punishes him. It doesn't allow us the same kind of fulfillment that those who root for Bruce Willis get at the end. Textual and ideological constraints don't prevent us from other interpretations, but it is often hard to get to those different points of view.

Dana Cloud (1992) is far more pessimistic. It is not just that oppositional readings of a text are difficult, but it is usually true that such moments are part of a grand design. In other words, the text allows you some free play, but that free play is itself incorporated back into the structure. This is how hegemony works. Instead of emphasizing the resistive nature of the concessions made by hegemonic persuasion, Cloud argues that they usually just help suck us back in. This is what she calls the ambivalence of texts. Maybe the movie purposefully made Hans somewhat charming and funny so we would identify with him a little tiny bit. Then when he is ultimately punished we are further chastised and the films' overall message becomes even more ideological.

Then Naomi Rockler (1999), in an article on 90210, adds one idea to Cloud's ambivalence. She argues that not only do texts constrain the oppositional meanings, but that unless an audience member is already in a place where they want to resist the ideology, they will not perform the work necessary to make potential areas of resistance oppositional. She calls this semivalence. The implication of this is that areas of ideological fissure or concessions in a text (a positive representation of a woman, let's say), are never big enough to lead to resist the overall sexist messages of the culture unless you already have that as a part of your agenda. Ultimately, we just want to be entertained. We don't want to think about this stuff. It is depressing. Even if you might be a feminist, you might ignore a problematic representation of a female just so that you can enjoy the movie.

The ongoing questions for students of popular culture can be summarized, then, as:

· What are the prevailing ideologies in our cultural products?

· How do they change and or differ across the cultural landscape and over time?

· Do we see evidence of ideological struggle?

· How much freedom do we have in our responses to the ideologies we experience in popular culture?

In fields of cultural studies and communication studies, these questions are typically approached through methods of textual analysis and audience ethnography. Textual analysis is where a scholar uses various accounts of texts and ideology to explore the meanings of a text and it likely effects. This is, of course, imprecise at best. Media ethnography involves the observation and interviewing of audience members to explore their reactions. The difficulty here is that if anything of false consciousness is true, people may not be able to answer questions meaningfully or accurately.

The question of alternatives is tough, though. How else are we to explore such a complicated set of phenomena? Other scholars have looked to social science methods for an answer, but these too are not without problems, as we will soon see.

By Steve Vrooman, revised January 2018

References

Althusser, L. (1971). Lenin and philosophy and other essays. New York: Monthly Review. http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/LPOE70NB.html.

Barthes, R. (1973). Mythologies. London: Paladin.

Cloud, D. (1992). The limits of interpretation: Ambivalence and stereotype in Spenser: For Hire. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 9, 311-324.

Condit, C. (1989). The rhetorical limits of polysemy. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 6, 103-122.

Eagleton, T. (1991) Ideology: An introduction, Verso.

Fanon, F. (1994/1952). Black skin, white masks. New York; Grove.

Fiske, J. (1986). Television: Polysemy and popularity. Critical Studies in Mass communication, 4, 391-408.

Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International.

Hennessy,R. (1993). Mateiralist feminism and the politics of discourse. New York: Routledge.

Kellner, D. (1998). Ernst Bloch, Utopia and Ideology Critique. http://www.uta.edu/english/dab/illuminations/kell1.html

Lacalu, E., & Mouffe, C. (1985). Hegemony and socialist strategy. London: Verso.

Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1845). The German ideology, including theses on Feuerbach. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/.

Rockler, N. (1999). From magic bullets to shooting blanks: Reality, criticism and Beverly Hills, 90210. Western Journal of Communication, 63, 72-95.

Wolf, N. (2002). The beauty myth: How images of beauty are used against women. New York: Harper.

Zizek, S. (1989). The sublime object of ideology. London: Verso.