Having
considered the processes of aestheticization and commodification,
we are now in a position to approach ideology, the most important
concept in cultural studies. But - and let's be clear about this
- ideology is a challenging concept, and all our preparations to
this point, helpful as they are, will not transform this rough hike
into a cake walk. As Terry Eagleton's treatment of this concept
suggests, ideology means many different things, and our first task
is to appreciate its polysemy.
Ideology
and False Consciousness
For
Karl Marx, ideology is a false consciousness that swaddles people
like blankets in winter to ward off the chill of deep critical reflection.
An apt paraphrase for the famous Marxian quip that "religion is
the opiate of the masses," would be, religion is the ideology of
the masses. From his point of view, people would do well to escape
any and every ideological moment. To the degree that they do not,
they are setting themselves up for self-mystification in service
to the economic system. People should crawl out from under ideology,
and flee towards a liberated awareness - frighteningly insecure
though it might be - towards a truthful take on social life.
As
Marx saw it, ideology performs two related functions. On the negative
side, it smothers liberal (open) and critical thought. On the positive
side, it legitimates power. Here, we should pause to consider this
heavy word "legitimates." Consider our common uses: legitimate theater
is serious; a legitimate Van Gogh is authentic; an illegitimate
child is a bastard. "Legitimacy" is almost always associated with
a claim to a bona fide membership in a class. Legitimate theater,
legitimate painting, and legitimate children consist of performance,
art works, and people who enjoy a well-founded and deeply rooted
claim to their status. They seem to come by that status naturally.
By contrast, do guerilla theatre, a Van Gogh reprint, or a child
born out of wedlock get treated less respectfully? Well, I don't
know, but I do remember that I tossed my faux van Gogh out in the
rubbish. However vague this notion of legitimacy may be, we can
nevertheless recognize the role of ideology in legitimating some
form of power insofar as it encourages thought and discourse that
naturalizes political regimes, rendering them proper, bona fide,
and worthy of respect. You don't toss a legitimate government out
in the rubbish.
One
feature of ideology that was overlooked by early Marxists is that
ideology is a process of practice as well as of thought. Ideology
is an accomplishment rather than a static inert system of thought.
We grow ideologies just as we grow peas, and we do so by our daily
words and practices. The Quakers seemed to sense this when they
objected so strenuously in seventeenth-century England to the then
common contrast between formal (elite) and informal (common) second-person
pronouns. They seemed to understand that the act of talking class
distinctions helps to concretize them. And by contrast, to refuse
to use pronouns of class is a step in the direction of de-legitimating
class distinctions. Such a focus on discourse counters the intuitively
heavy emphasis given to thought and ideas when talking about ideology.
We should be able to see, with Eagleton, that "ideologies are action-oriented
sets of beliefs rather than speculative theoretical systems." Such
a notion of words that "grow" ideologies is central to Pierre Bourdieu's
so-called "reproduction theory" according to which everyday action
reproduces the conditions of ideological domination.
Ideologies
are accomplished in and through the repetitious actions of everyday
life. Brushing your teeth after waking up in the morning, covering
your mouth when you cough, saying "Hi!" to a colleague who passes
in the hallway, kissing your kids at night before they go to sleep,
all these routine are occasions for reproducing ideology. They reflect
our social commitments while simultaneously rooting those commitments
deeper in daily practice. With each new rehearsal of such habits,
those habits become more solidly entrenched and more thoroughly
legitimated. Ideological foundations are built, through these habits,
in a sedimentary fashion, layer over layer over layer of action,
with the weight of the whole compressed and compacted in memory,
as Paul Connerton says, squeezing aside details, and leaving only
the most general outlines of our sociality. In this way, as Clifford
Geertz has argued, the simple and unconsciously performed social
acts of everyday life become "models of" but also "models for" our
social lives. They constitute us ideologically at the same time
that they reveal our social constitution.
We
can better appreciate the ideologies that are accomplished in the
dimly lit corners of everyday practice by focussing our attention
on ideological accomplishments that take place in more clearly defined
and brightly shining areas of social life, namely, in "public performances."
Public performances are sharply defined moments of public display
of a talent or competence, playful moments of heightened intensity
that idealize the management of power in social life. Performances
are sharply defined, often physically so, and set off from the practices
of everyday life. The curtain goes up to start the play, the whistle
blows to start the game, and the heavy silence of the church defines
the space dedicated to liturgical performance. In all these ways,
public performances are set apart, and endowed with a special kind
of seriousness, even if it's the playful seriousness of a Robin
Williams or a Steven Wright doing a comic monologue. Public performances
are as serious as they are because they embody ideals of how we
are to be social and, more specifically, of how we are to manage
power, that is, ideological ideals.
Those
who take in performances, whether those performances are films,
or musical events, museum displays, football games, stand-up comedy
acts or advertising photographs in magazines operate by unconsciously
inserting themselves into the roles being performed. That's why
we get so tense on third-and-eight plays in football. Momentarily,
we become Brett Favres. In a basketball game that goes into double
overtime, we become Michael Jordans and we expect ourselves to perform
to perfection. Some aspects of our identification are more conscious
than others. When we see a magazine ad that features a handsome
couple sipping wine in a posh hotel room, we can easily recognize
the spotlight placed on their grace and beauty. But, we also identify
with a host of less clearly spotlighted aspects of the photo. Our
eyes, glancing over the glossy, instantly connect disparate points
and reconstitute idealized relations. Like the eyes that stare up
at a theater marquee and swear that the lights are hopping from
bulb to bulb, our manner of discerning a magazine ad is one that
discovers habits of sociality and takes them to be models for our
social life. In this way ideology is accomplished.
Debating
the Concept of Dominant Ideology 
However
ideology is portrayed, whether as ideas or as actions, the strong
suggestion remains that a single powerful ideology reigns supreme
in modern life. This ideology serves the interests of the powerful
and shapes the thoughts and actions of the weak.
Such
a claim for a "dominant ideology" that serves elites and
oppresses the powerless has been criticized by Abercrombie, Hill and
Turner in The Dominant Ideology Thesis (1980), by James Scott
in Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990), and by Terry
Eagleton in Ideology (1991). The criticisms of the claim offered
by Abercrombie et al. were, according to Eagleton, "a valuable
correction to a left idealism which would overestimate the significance
of culture and ideology for the maintenance of political power. Such
"culturalism," pervasive throughout the 1970s, was itself
a reaction to an earlier Marxist economism" (p. 36).
Scott
mulled over the links between "dominant ideology" and
"false consciousness" and arrived at the following helpful
distinction. "I believe we can discern a thick and a thin version
of false consciousness. The thick version claims that a dominant
ideology works its magic by persuading subordinate groups to believe
actively in the values that explain and justify their own subordination.
Evidence against this thick theory of mystification is pervasive
enough to convince me that it is generally untenable....The thin
theory of false consciousness, on the other hand, maintains only
that the dominant ideology achieves compliance by convincing subordinate
groups that the social order in which they live is natural and inevitable.
The thick claims consent; the thin theory settles for resignation.
In its most subtle form, the thin theory is eminently plausible,
and, some would claim, true by definition. I believe, nevertheless,
that it is fundemantally wrong and hope to show why..." (p.
72).
Flaws
An
additional weakness of the claim for a "dominant ideology"
is its assumption that ideologies are fabrications of the powerful
only and not of the powerful. The assumption that only established
power, governments in place, and regimes already in control of a
populace get the opportunity to create and promote ideologies is
specious. One might get the idea that IBM, GM, and Ma Bell are in
the business of manufacturing ideologies, while Joe Sixpack and
his family, pure as the driven snow, are never responsible for false
consciousnesses. It is to the credit of contemporary critical Marxists
that the notion of ideology has been expanded. First, we know that
ideologies are historically deep-seated systems of practice-and-thought.
However, there were no IBMs or GMs present in the first centuries
of Christianity, when believers cobbled together some attractive
new ways of talking about and caring for the "self". And no Ma Bell
encouraged these Platonic ways to persist in the West for 2000 years
to the point that they now serve as the foundation for our market
economy, for our legal system that assigns responsibility and culpability
for action, and for our political system with its assumptions about
the native faculties of citizens and about their rights to exercise
those faculties in our democratic system of government.
Furthermore,
we know that ideologies are diverse and not unitary. Cultural studies
has been forced to rethink both idea of a single "dominant ideology"
and the idea that that "dominant ideology serves the interests of
those in power. As Raymond Williams argued,, "No mode of production
and therefore no dominant social order and therefore no dominant
culture ever in reality includes or exhausts all human practice,
human energy, and human intention."
 Finally,
a strong opinion has been encouraged by the work of both Antonio Gramsci
and Mikhail Bakhtin to the effect that ideological effects are always
the result of confrontations and accomodations among competing ideological
forces. If power in the modern world is exercised through hegemony,
then one can suspect that hegemonic power is multifaceted, the result
of a confrontation between multiple forces of domination and multiple
forces of resistance. The task of analyzing such complex hegemonic
conditions is one that stands high on the list of priorities for cultural
studies. We will revisit this issue in the course of examining three
domains of popular culture that are bound to be of interest to anthropologists
while being, at the same time, riddled with hegemonic contest. These
three domains are museum, music, and film.
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