Ideology & Hegemony in Postcolonial Studies

On Ideology and Hegemony | Ania Loomba

Some interesting tidbits on Postcolonial Studies, from Professor Ania Loomba’s insightful book titled, Colonialism/Postcolonialism for us all!

And for those of you who wish to wade good measure into Postcolonial Studies, I would strongly recommend this book to be included as part of your initiation rites into the arena of PoCo studies.

As Peter Hulme from the University of Essex puts it, “Colonialism/Postcolonialism is both a crystal-clear and authoritative introduction to the field… It’s exactly the sort of book teachers want their students to read.”

Priyamvada Gopal, Faculty of English, Cambridge University also vouches much to the uniqueness of this book. She says, “It is rare to come across a book that can engage both student and specialist. Loomba simultaneously maps a field and contributes provocatively to key debates within it. Situated comparatively across disciplines and cultural contexts, this book is essential reading for anyone with an interest in postcolonial studies.”

So over to this insightful read on Postcolonial Studies, from Ania Loomba –

Just snippets and snippets alone! and the rest are for y’all to read! J

Loomba, citing Marx and Engels says that, ‘the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.’

Loomba then asks, ‘How is it that ordinary people come to be persuaded of a specific view of things?’

In other words, the crucial question about ideology is not whether it is ‘real’ or ‘false’ but how it comes to be believed in, and to be lived out. It was in trying to understand these questions that Gramsci formulated his concept of ‘hegemony’.

Hegemony is power achieved through a combination of coercion and consent. Playing upon Machiavelli’s suggestion that power can be achieved through both force and fraud, Gramsci argued that the ruling classes achieve domination not by force or coercion alone, but also by creating subjects who ‘willingly’ submit to being ruled.

Ideology is crucial in creating consent, it is the medium through which certain ideas are transmitted and, more important, held to be true. Hegemony is achieved not only by direct manipulation or indoctrination, but by playing upon the common sense of people, upon what Raymond Williams calls their ‘lived system of meanings and values’.

Gramsci thus views ideologies as more than just reflections of material reality. Rather, ideologies are conceptions of life that are manifest in all aspects of individual and collective existence. By suggesting this, Gramsci is not simply interested in expanding the meaning of ideology, but in understanding also how ideologies animate social relations, ‘organize human masses, and create the terrain on which men move, acquire consciousness of their position, struggle, etc.’

For now let us trace how debates about ideology have  shaped key ‘post-structuralist’ notions of power, whose place within postcolonial studies is so contentious today.

The work of the French communist theorist Louis Althusser on ideology has been central in this regard. Althusser opened up certain important and new areas of inquiry such as how ideologies are internalised, how human beings make dominant ideas ‘their own’, how they express socially determined views ‘spontaneously’. Althusser was interested in how subjects and their deepest selves are ‘interpellated’ (the term is borrowed from Freud), positioned (the term is Lacan’s), and shaped by what lies outside them. Ideologies may express the interests of social groups, but they work through and upon individual people or ‘subjects’. In fact subjectivity, or personhood, Althusser suggested, is itself formed in and through ideology. He explicitly borrowed from Lacanian psychoanalysis and its account of subject-formation through language (and its slippages) in probing how ideology might work.

Gramsci had suggested that hegemony is achieved via a combination of ‘force’ and ‘consent’ - Althusser argued that in modern capitalist societies, the former is achieved by ‘Repressive State Apparatuses’ such as the army and the police, but the latter is enforced via ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ such as schools, the Church, the family, media and political systems. These ideological apparatuses assist in the reproduction of the dominant system by creating subjects who are ideologically conditioned to accept the values of the system.

Such an idea is immensely useful in demystifying certain apparently innocent and apolitical institutions and has subsequently influenced analyses of schools, universities, family structures, and (via the work of Althusser’s friend Pierre Machery) literary texts.

Althusser’s work and the renewed interest it sparked in issues of ideologies, language and subjectivity have had a somewhat contradictory effect. It certainly opened up innovative ways of analysing institutions as well as ideas. At the same time, following upon Althusser’s interest in language and psyche, subject-formation is often taken to be an effect of language and ideas, and a matter of individual psychic development alone. These innovative as well as reductive effects are both visible in postcolonial studies, often refracted through the writings of Althusser’s student Michel Foucault. Foucault’s work stands at the intersection of innovations in theories of ideology, subjectivity and language, and has exerted an important (some would say even definitive) influence on the shaping of post-modernist and post-structuralist ideas and, via Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), on postcolonial studies.

Foucault pushed to an extreme the idea of human beings being determined by the conditions of their existence. Like Marx and Engels, and Althusser after them, he tried to understand how the human subject is not an autonomous, free entity. However, his search led him to reject the distinction between ideas and material existence altogether and to abandon entirely the category of ‘ideology’. All human ideas, and all fields of knowledge, are structured and determined by ‘the laws of a certain code of knowledge’ (Foucault 1970: ix). Thus no subject is ‘free’ and no utterance undetermined by a predetermined order or code. It is in this sense that Foucault pronounces the death of the author, for no single individual is the sole source of any utterance. This view intersects with certain important innovations in linguistics which also challenged conventional ways of thinking about human utterance.

According to one critic, it is ‘the triple alliance’ between Althusserian Marxism, Lacanian psychoanalysis and Saussurean linguistics which spawns discourse analysis.

The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure had argued that the relation between the ‘signifier’ (which is a sound image) and the ‘signified’ (which is the concept to which it refers) is arbitrary, which is to say that words achieve their meaning from an association in the mind, not from any natural or necessary reference to entities in the real world. These associations work through the principle of exclusion, which is to say that any sign achieves meaning diacritically, or through a system of differentiation from other signs. Thus, language is not a nomenclature, or a way of naming things which already exist, but a system of signs, whose meaning is relational. Only a social group can produce signs, because only a specific social usage gives a sign any meaning. So, if ‘in Welsh the colour glas (blue), like the Latin glaucus, includes elements which the English would identify as green or grey’, the different meanings are put into place by the different communities using these words (Belsey 1980: 39). The sign, or words, need a community with shared assumptions to confer them with meaning; conversely, a social group needs signs in order to know itself as a community. On this basis, we can think of language as ideological rather than as objective.

Several influential thinkers such as Lévi-Strauss attempted to systematize Saussure’s ideas and suggest that there were general laws that governed how any and all signs worked, so that with the same general understanding, any cultural or signifying practice—from hair styles to myths—could be studied. This assumption, that there are general and ‘scientific’ laws underlying all cultural production (known as structuralism), was criticised from several different directions.

The French Marxist Pierre Macherey objected to it on the grounds that no single system of meaning can work in every place and at every time. To find such a system would be to imply that texts acquire meaning even before they are written. Instead, Macherey suggested that texts can only be understood in the context of their utterance. The literary text ‘is not created by an intention (objective or subjective); it is produced under determinate conditions’. When and where a text is written, the language in which it is inscribed, the traditions and debates within which it intervenes all come together to create a textual fabric.

to be continued...

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