Raymond Williams, 4. Ideology (Marxism and Literature)

The concept of 'ideology' is an essential aspect of almost all Marxist thinking about culture, literature, and ideas. It can be divided into three common versions: (i) a system of beliefs characteristic of a particular class or group; (ii) a system of illusory beliefs-false ideas or false consciousness-which can be contrasted with true or scientific knowledge; and (iii) the general process of the production of meanings and ideas. In one variant of Marxism, senses (i) and (ii) can be effectively combined, as in a class society, all beliefs are founded on class position, and the systems of belief of all classes are either part or wholly false (illusory). This has led to intense controversy within Marxist thought.

Ideology was coined in the late eighteenth century by French philosopher Destutt, who believed that ideas were not to be and could not be understood in any of the older'metaphysical' or 'idealist' senses. He argued that the science of ideas must be a natural science, since all ideas originate in man's experience of the world. The initial bearings of the concept of ideology are complex, as it asserted against metaphysics that there are 'no ideas in the world but those of men'. However, as a branch of empirical science, 'ideology' was limited by its philosophical assumptions to a version of ideas as 'transformed sensations' and language as a'system of signs'.

The concept of ideology in Marxism and Literature was a significant development that aimed to address the practical exclusion of social relationships implied in the model of'man' and 'the world' and the displacement of necessary social relationships to a formal system, such as the laws of psychology or language as a system of signs. This opposition was made from generally reactionary positions, which sought to retain the sense of activity in its old metaphysical forms.

Marx and Engels took up and applied this condemnation of 'ideology' in their early writings, attacking their German contemporaries in The German Ideology (1846). They saw finding 'primary causes' in 'ideas' as the basic error and introduced 'the real ground of history' - the process of production and self-production - from which the origins and growth of different theoretical products could be traced.

However, there were obvious complications at this stage, as 'ideology' became a polemical nickname for kinds of thinking that neglected or ignored the material social process of which consciousness was always a part. The language used to describe this separation is simplistic and has been disastrous in its repetition, belonging to the naive dualism of mechanical materialism, which has repeated the idealist separation of ideas and material reality but reversed its priorities.

In Capital (1956), Marx and Engels emphasize the importance of imagination in shaping human labor, but their approach to abstract empiricism was criticized for embracing the cynicism of practical men and the abstract empiricism of a version of "natural science." They introduced the sense of material and social history as the real relationship between "man" and "nature," but also sought to abstract the persuasive "men in the flesh," who are also conscious men. This confusion is the source of the naive reduction of consciousness, imagination, art, and ideas to reflexes, echoes, pluralism, and unity in the concept of "ideology."

The text argues that when speculation ends in real life, there is real, sensible science that begins: the representation of the practical activity and the process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge takes its place. Philosophy as an independent branch of activity loses its medium of existence. The use of 'consciousness' and 'philosophy' depends on the argument that separating consciousness and thought from the material social process is futile, making consciousness and thought into ideology. However, this can be taken in a different way, such as separating consciousness and thought from real knowledge and the practical process. This leads to simple reductionism, where consciousness and its products can be nothing but reflections of what has already occurred in the material social process.

Experience shows that this is a poor practical way of understanding 'consciousness and its products'. The real problem is that the separation and abstraction of 'consciousness's- and its products' as a reflective or semaphore process results in a separate level of 'consciousness and its products'. These processes are always, though in variable forms, parts of the "Iliaterr~r~r:Qrocess~•rtseii," whether as the necessity of 'lem-etiíiiliB.giiiiiiiiii' in the labor process or as the necessary conditions of associated labor, language, and practical ideas of relation-snfp;o~wniehls-;o ofi'en an(fs'igiiffkiintly orgotten, mtlie rear-processes, all of them physical and material, most of them manifestly so- which are masked and idealized as 'consciousness and its products' but which, when seen without illusions, are themselves necessarily social material activities.

The concept of'science' is difficult to understand, as it has a much broader meaning than English science has had since the early nineteenth century. The German Wissenschaft and the French science have a much broader meaning than English science has had since the early nineteenth century. The real, practical dissolution of these phrases, the removal of these terms from the discourse, is a crucial step towards a more comprehensive understanding of society.

Ideology is a process of thought that derives both its form and conterit from pure thought, either their own or that of their predecessors. It can appear virtually psychological, structurally similar to the Freudian concept of 'rationalization'. In this form, a version of 'ideology' is readily accepted in modern bourgeois thought, which has its own concepts of the'real'-material or psychological-to undercue either ideology or rationalization. However, it had once been a more serious position, identified as a consequence of the division of labor.

The division of labor manifests itself also in the ruling class as the division of mental and material labor, so that inside this class one part appears as the thinkers of the class (its active, conceptive ideologists), while the other part's attitude to these ideas and illusions is more passive and receptive, as they are in reality the active members of this class and have less time to make illusions and ideas abaeus.

Ideology hovers between a system of beliefs characteristic of a certain class and a system of illusory beliefs-false ideas or false consciousness-which can be contrasted with true or scientific knowledge. This uncertainty was never really resolved, and ideology as a separate theory is itself separated from the (intrinsically limited) 'practical consciousness of a class'. This separation is easier to carry out in theory than in practice.

The existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular period presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class, but this may or may not be true, as all the difficult questions arise about the development of a pre-revolutionary or potentially revolutionary class into a sustained revolutionary class. Marx and Engels's own complicated relations to the revolutionary character of the European proletariat and their complicated relationship to their intellectual predecessors demonstrate this difficulty.

The concept of 'ideology' has been a topic of debate within Marxism, with various interpretations and uses. One such interpretation is the abstraction of 'ideology' as a category of illusions and false consciousness, which would prevent examination of the material social process in which ideas become practical. This abstraction differs from Marx's emphasis on a necessary conflict of real interests, the material social process, and ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.

Throughout the development of Marxism, there has been a dogmatic retention of ideology as 'false consciousness', which has often prevented the more specific analysis of operative distinctions of 'true' and 'false' consciousness at the practical level. Lenin's formulation sees 'ideology' as introduced on the foundation of all human knowledge, science, etc., brought to bear from a class point of view.

There is an obvious need for a general term to describe not only the products but also the processes of all signification, including the signification of values. 'Ideology' and 'ideological' have been widely used in this sense, with 'ideological' being taken as the dimension of social experience in which meanings and values are produced.