From a presentation I gave at Space Gallery
As I said before on this blog, ideology is perhaps better grasped as an intersecting field of problems and questions than a concept or theory. It is a way of thinking together the relation between the question of knowledge, the social order, and political power. Of course, these different aspects are unequally and unevenly applied in different thinkers, a point that I tried to sketch out earlier with Machiavelli, Spinoza, and Marx.
Sticking with the themes of using proper names as placeholders, which they often are, I can say that there are two more aporias, or at least tensions, that I would like to mention here. (Despite the argument of being for or against dualisms, so much in philosophy depends on how we understand the relation between pairs of concepts, as contradictions, aporias, antinomies, and so on, but this is more than a parenthetical point). These tensions define the concept. The first comes from Balibar, who writes,
"I shall take the liberty of advancing the following interpretation: domination by an established order does indeed rest, as Marx argued after Hegel, on the ideological universalization of its principles. But, contrary to what Marx believed, the 'dominant ideas' cannot be those of the dominant class. They have to be those of the dominated, the ideas which state their theoretical right to recognition and equal capacity."
Elsewhere on this blog, and in The Double Shift, I have offered my own interpretation of this statement, referring to it as a Machiavellian correction to Marx, based on Machiavelli's advice to rulers in The Prince. As Machiavelli writes,
"So a ruler must be extremely careful not to say anything
that doesn’t appear to be inspired by the five virtues listed
above; he must seem and sound wholly compassionate,
wholly loyal, wholly humane, wholly honest and wholly
religious. There is nothing more important than appearing to
be religious. In general people judge more by appearances
than first-hand experience, because everyone gets to see you
but hardly anyone deals with you directly. Everyone sees what
you seem to be, few have experience of who you really are,
and those few won’t have the courage to stand up to majority
opinion underwritten by the authority of state."
Or, as Althusser puts it in his little book on Machiavelli,“The prince must take the reality of popular ideology into account, and inscribe therein his own representation, which is the public face of the state.”
Rather than see Machiavelli and Marx as opposed, I prefer to think of these two assertions to be in perpetual tension. How this works out in practice is the ruling ideas constantly need to incorporate the ideas of the ruled, of the dominated, in order to rule. In Machiavelli's time this meant incorporating religion and piety into their presentation. In our day and age, the established pieties are less religious and more economic, everyone must appear to be a worker and be familiar with the economy, that "religion of daily life,"as André Tosel reminds us. In some sense ideology is the space where the ideas of the dominant become the idea of the dominated, and vice versa, as experiences are constantly trickling up and moving down according to the vicissitudes of class rule.
To take one example, the last four or five decades in the US have seen drastic cuts to the taxes of the wealthiest Americans, but these tax cuts are often presented as if they answer to the demands of the dominated class. Which is not to say that this is a complete illusion, or Machiavellian manipulation. It is more that the ruling class has been able to translate and transform the worsening economic conditions of the ruled, declining wages and increased costs of housing, education, and health care, into a demand that serves the rulers, a demand for lower taxes for the highest brackets.
Two images which should be looked at side by side
One definition of hegemony could be this transformation of the experiences and grievances of the ruled into the ideas of and for the ruling class. As Marx and Engels write in The German Ideology,
"For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones. The class making a revolution appears from the very start, if only because it is opposed to a class, not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society; it appears as the whole mass of society confronting the one ruling class."
A lot more could be said about this tension between the Marxist and Machiavellian aspects of ideology, but all of this is a preamble to another tension that I want to explore. Once again taking proper names as placeholders I would say that this is a tension between a Gramscian dimension and an Althusserian dimension of ideology.
By the Gramscian dimension I am referring to the famous statement of Antonio Gramsci with respect to Fordism in America, "Hegemony here is born in the factory and requires for its exercise only a minute quantity of
professional political and ideological intermediaries." To simplify things greatly, we could identify this assertion with the idea that ideology does not stem from some attempt to disseminate ideas through the superstructure, the state, and media, but is already produced at the base. As Gramsci writes, "the structure dominates the superstructure."
To flesh out this idea I turn to two interpreters of Gramsci, Michael Buroway and André Tosel. With respect to the first, Michael Burawoy, is less an interpretation than a matter of putting this idea to test in different contexts, examining how "consent is produced at the point of production." As Burawoy argues, "The production of things is simultaneously not only the production and reproduction of social relations but also the production of an experience of those relations." Burawoy's own work, his working in sites of production, demonstrates how the experience on the factory floor produces its own "consent" to its structures. Burawoy is particularly attentive to the way in which the structure of work itself, the way tasks are distributed, and promotions are earned, produces their own legitimacy in that it gives people a way to structure their striving (to be somewhat Spinozist, or Lordonian about it). As Buroway writes, "Ideology is, therefore not something manipulated at will by agencies of socialization--schools, family, church, and so on--in the interests of a dominant class. On the contrary, these institutions elaborate and systematize lived experience and only in this way become centers of ideological dissemination."
Tosel's reading of Gramsci is focused less on the specifics of the politics of the factory floor than on the general social transformation that it is part of--particularly the way in which the rationalization of the factory becomes a general social logic. For Tosel this is the significance of "passive revolution," a revolution of the norms of ethical and political life produced not by the dominant class, at least directly, but produced by the way in which economic life is structured.
In contrast to Gramsci on this point we have Althusser, and his claim in the famous essay on ideology, that "the reproduction of labor power takes place outside of the firm." As Althusser goes onto argue, ideology necessary demands a different logic, and a different temporality, one that is beyond the purview of individual capitalists, and individual firms, one focused not on production, but on reproduction. Reproduction demands a fundamentally different institution, that of the Ideological State Apparatus, the can reproduce labor power, as skilled, docile, and exploitable. This is what is done by the church, in the feudal era; the school, in the time of Althusser's writing, and some new institution, such as the media, in the modern age. The superstructure reproduces the conditions of the base. Of course such an assertion fundamentally inverts the very image, making the base depend on the superstructure. As Balibar writes,
"Instead of adding a theory of the “superstructure” to the existing theory of the structure, he aims at transforming the concept of the structure itself by showing that its process of “production” and “reproduction” originarily depends on unconscious ideological conditions. As a consequence a social formation is no longer representable in dualistic terms—a thesis that logically should lead us to abandon the image of the “superstructure." Another concept of historical complexity must be elaborated, with opposite sociological, anthropological, and ontological prerequisites.
Thus it is possible to oppose Gramsci and Althusser, at least according to these two statements, "Hegemony is born in the factory"and "reproduction takes place outside of the firm." With the first there is the assertion that there is no such thing as purely economic activity, of a base that would not also be superstructure, and, with the second, there would be the assertion that the base, the economy, necessarily relies on a production of subjectivity which is prior to it, and exceeds it.
One could even add this opposition, this tension, to the one above between Marx and Machiavelli, this would allow us to map different forms and types of ideology, depending upon how much it contains elements of the ruling or ruled class, on the Marx/Machiavelli axis, and how much it is produced in and through economic activity, or how much it is relayed in and through institutions of the superstructure, on the Gramsci/Althusser axis
. 
As much as it might be interesting to draw such a graph, and it is possible to place different conceptions of ideology on it, it would seem to miss the point entirely by representing a dynamic process as a static image. The tension between Marx and Machiavelli, Gramsci and Althusser, is less about different positions than it is a process, or two interlinking processes: the first is one in which the experiences and ideals of the dominated class are being represented, and distorted, by the dominant class; the second is one in which the material conditions, economic relations, are constantly being represented and distorted by cultural institutions. In The Double Shift I tried to make sense of this as a double determination drawing from Marx and Spinoza. I have added multiple figures here only to suggest that the problem of ideology is complex enough that different theories, different interventions, see and grasp different sides of it. Sometimes it is necessary to stress, as Marx did in formulating the concept, that the ideas that are dominant at a given moment in society have a necessary class basis, sometimes it is necessary, to insist that the factory is not just the imposition of mute necessity, that the economy is also experience, as it was for Gramsci and Buroway, and sometimes it is necessary, as it was for Althusser, to stress that the superstructure is also a site of struggle. We all pose the question of ideology from the conditions we are given, a statement which includes this blogpost as well.
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