Ideology

Ideology | John Storey

Ideology is a crucial concept in the study of popular culture.

Graeme Turner calls it ‘the most important conceptual category in cultural studies’.

James Carey has even suggested that ‘British cultural studies could be described just as easily and perhaps more accurately as ideological studies’.

Like culture, ideology has many competing meanings.

An understanding of this concept is often complicated by the fact that in much cultural analysis the concept is used interchangeably with culture itself, and especially popular culture.

The fact that ideology has been used to refer to the same conceptual terrain as culture and popular culture makes it an important term in any understanding of the nature of popular culture.

What follows is a brief discussion of just five of the many ways of understanding ideology.

We will consider only those meanings that have a bearing on the study of popular culture.

First, ideology can refer to a systematic body of ideas articulated by a particular group of people.

For example, we could speak of ‘professional ideology’ to refer to the ideas which inform the practices of particular professional groups.

We could also speak of the ‘ideology of the Labour Party’.

Here we would be referring to the collection of political, economic and social ideas that inform the aspirations and activities of the Party.

A second definition suggests a certain masking, distortion, or concealment. Ideology is used here to indicate how some texts and practices present distorted images of reality.

They produce what is sometimes called ‘false consciousness’. Such distortions, it is argued, work in the interests of the powerful against the interests of the powerless.

Using this definition, we might speak of capitalist ideology. What would be intimated by this usage would be the way in which ideology conceals the reality of domination from those in power: the dominant class do not see themselves as exploiters or oppressors.

And, perhaps more importantly, the way in which ideology conceals the reality of subordination from those who are powerless: the subordinate classes do not see themselves as oppressed or exploited.

This definition derives from certain assumptions about the circumstances of the production of texts and practices.

It is argued that they are the superstructural ‘reflections’ or ‘expressions’ of the power relations of the economic base of society.

This is one of the fundamental assumptions of classical Marxism.

Here is Karl Marx’s famous formulation: In the social production of their existence men enter into definite, necessary relations, which are independent of their will, namely, relations of production corresponding to a determinate stage of development of their material forces of production.

The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation on which there arises a legal and political superstructure and to which there correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general.

What Marx is suggesting is that the way a society organizes the means of its economic production will have a determining effect on the type of culture that society produces or makes possible.

The cultural products of this so-called base/superstructure relationship are deemed ideological to the extent that, as a result of this relationship, they implicitly or explicitly support the interests of dominant groups who, socially, politically, economically and culturally, benefit from this particular economic organization of society.

We can also use ideology in this general sense to refer to power relations outside those of class. For instance, feminists speak of the power of patriarchal ideology, and how it operates to conceal, mask and distort gender relations in our society.

A third definition of ideology uses the term to refer to ‘ideological forms’. This usage is intended to draw attention to the way in which texts (television fiction, pop songs, novels, feature films, etc.) always present a particular image of the world.

This definition depends on a notion of society as conflictual rather than consensual, structured around inequality, exploitation and oppression.

Texts are said to take sides, consciously or unconsciously, in this conflict. The German playwright Bertolt Brecht (1978) summarizes the point: ‘Good or bad, a play always includes an image of the world. . . .

There is no play and no theatrical performance which does not in some way affect the dispositions and conceptions of the audience. Art is never without consequences’. Brecht’s point can be generalized to apply to all texts.

Another way of saying this would be simply to argue that all texts are ultimately political.

That is, they offer competing ideological significations of the way the world is or should be.

Popular culture is thus, as Hall claims, a site where ‘collective social understandings are created’: a terrain on which ‘the politics of signification’ are played out in attempts to win people to particular ways of seeing the world!

A fourth definition of ideology is one associated with the early work of the French cultural theorist Roland Barthes. Barthes argues that ideology (or ‘myth’ as Barthes himself calls it) operates mainly at the level of connotations, the secondary, often unconscious meanings that texts and practices carry, or can be made to carry.

For example, a Conservative Party political broadcast transmitted in 1990 ended with the word ‘socialism’ being transposed into red prison bars. What was being suggested is that the socialism of the Labour Party is synonymous with social, economic and political imprisonment. The broadcast was attempting to fix the connotations of the word ‘socialism’.

Moreover, it hoped to locate socialism in a binary relationship in which it connoted unfreedom, whilst conservatism connoted freedom.

For Barthes, this would be a classic example of the operations of ideology, the attempt to make universal and legitimate what is in fact partial and particular; an attempt to pass off that which is cultural (i.e. humanly made) as something which is natural (i.e. just existing).

Similarly, it could be argued that in British society white, masculine, heterosexual, middle class, are unmarked in the sense that they are the ‘normal’, the ‘natural’, the ‘universal’, from which other ways of being are an inferior variation on an original.

This is made clear in such formulations as a female pop singer, a black journalist, a working-class writer, a gay comedian.

In each instance the first term is used to qualify the second as a deviation from the ‘universal’ categories of pop singer, journalist, writer and comedian.

A fifth definition is one that was very influential in the 1970s and early 1980s. It is the definition of ideology developed by the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser.

Here I will simply outline some key points about one of his definitions of ideology.

Althusser’s main contention is to see ideology not simply as a body of ideas, but as a material practice. What he means by this is that ideology is encountered in the practices of everyday life and not simply in certain ideas about everyday life.

Principally, what Althusser has in mind is the way in which certain rituals and customs have the effect of binding us to the social order: a social order that is marked by enormous inequalities of wealth, status and power.

Using this definition, we could describe the seaside holiday or the celebration of Christmas as examples of ideological practices.

This would point to the way in which they offer pleasure and release from the usual demands of the social order, but that, ultimately, they return us to our places in the social order, refreshed and ready to tolerate our exploitation and oppression until the next official break comes along.

In this sense, ideology works to reproduce the social conditions and social relations necessary for the economic conditions and economic relations of capitalism to continue.

So far we have briefly examined different ways of defining culture and ideology.

What should be clear by now is that culture and ideology do cover much the same conceptual landscape.

The main difference between them is that ideology brings a political dimension to the shared terrain.

In addition, the introduction of the concept of ideology suggests that relations of power and politics inescapably mark the culture/ideology landscape; it suggests that the study of popular culture amounts to something more than a simple discussion of entertainment and leisure.