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Alex Brey
PHL 311
Dr. Hassell
15 Dec. 2010
Theories of Ideology
I am going to offer an introduction and history of the term 'ideology'. For most of this, I am just
summarizing secondary sources or rewording for clarity's sake. I think this might be valuable for
someone just approaching the topic, and especially for someone who has not read much philosophy.
Sources on ideology, like much of philosophy, are fairly allusive. Hopefully, the history and analysis I
offer here would serve as an accessible introduction to the topic. My main source is Terry Eagleton's
"Ideology and its Vicissitudes in Western Marxism", the problem with which is that it fails to really
introduce the topic. His discussion assumes so much prior knowledge as to render it fairly
impenetrable. The first part of my explication is organized around four problems which force us to
revise our notions of ideology. I follow that up with a discussion of several influential subsequent
discussions of ideology, concluding with Slovaj Žižek's theory.
In order to understand ideology we need to talk about ideas, what and where they are, and the
ways people have examined them. In anybody's theory of ideas, we are dealing with a term that either
corresponds to something in the world, or coheres within the context of an imaginary structure. John
Locke offers a prominent theory of ideas, so I will start by outlining that. For him ideas are "that which
[man's] mind is applied about whilst thinking...such as are those expressed by the words whiteness,
hardness, sweetness, thinking, motion, man, elephant, army, drunkenness, and others" (Locke Book II).
Here Locke is suggesting that ideas are a sort of subjective equivalent of language: ideas are words in
the head. Furthermore he seems to suggest a direct correspondence between sensation and reality, the
idea of whiteness corresponds to a white thing. The way to examine thought, by this account, is to
examine thought's real world correspondences. Locke and his theory of ideas are often termed
'empiricist' because they suppose we have empirical access to the stuff of knowledge. The problem for
later thinkers is that Locke's theory cannot account for ideas wholly, especially in the case of ideas that
fail to correspond to reality. We can imagine a whole range of things that are not real, or at least that we
have never experienced. The term ideology develops as a way of getting around the necessity of a
water-tight metaphysical conception of ideas.
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In the 18th century Destutt de Tracy changed how people thought about ideas. He used
'ideology', Greek for "the science of ideas" to describe his approach. For him it had become necessary
to reject the metaphysical examination of ideas, but to approach them thru "knowledge of effects and
their practical consequences" (qtd. in Kennedy 355). The neologism and especially the association with
science serve to sever ties with the 'philosophy of ideas' and to realign the discipline with economic and
political science. You might object that economic and political science are likely just as metaphysically
unsure as philosophy, and perhaps that is true. However, regardless of de Tracy's reasons for redefining
the study of ideas, ideology is valuable because it gets at several distinct problems. The first problem is
reflexive: how do we study ideas? Ideology answers, by studying effects and consequences,
"unconscious intellectual habits...particularly in language. From habit alone, Tracy
had written, 'stem practically all the difficulties of the science called ideology'"
(Kennedy 357).
The second thing ideology is useful for is the examination of ideas that do not match reality. For
Tracy, the ideological task was to seek out and analyze ruptures in reality and language, "We can never
pay too much attention to the illusions which certain words produce. Nothing proves better how vague
and confused their meaning is" (qtd. in Kennedy 357). Again, ideology is a really radical approach
because we can get to practical analysis, whereas with the metaphysical analysis of ideas it was really
hard to prove conclusively anything at all about the nature of ideas. The liberatory assumption ideology
makes is that there is a difference between reality and language, which then allows us to interrogate the
nature and effects of that division. We are then to some extent pardoned from having to exactly define
reality, language and thought. However, we should remember that it's only a conditional pardon, and an
analysis claiming to do anything more than predict again becomes subject to metaphysical justification.
Karl Marx was chronologically the next person to significantly take up the notion of ideology,
and his usage of it was in the capacity of an analysis of ideas that do not correspond to reality.
Regarding ideology, what is significant about Marx is how he situates it within a theory. Because
Marx's revisioning of ideology was influential, I will explain how ideology fits into his theory in detail.
He gives a nice characterization of his theory in Alienated Labor in the context of distinguishing his
project from that of political economy, "[political economy] grasps the actual, material process of
private property in abstract and general formulae which it then takes as laws. It does not comprehend
these laws, that is, does not prove them as proceeding from the nature of private property" (Marx 58).
Private property, here, is the thing being examined, our subject, or what Durkheim would later call a
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social fact. Political economy approaches the social fact as ideology just as much as Marx does, but the
constitutive illusion or rupture is imagined differently. For the economist private property has a
material existence that he wants to abstractly symbolize. The rupture that makes it ideology is the fact
that certain aspects of it need further symbolization. The economist's ideological task is to explain how
reality works. Marx relocates the rupture, for him the term actually misrepresents reality. In other
words, 'private property' misrepresents reality because it hides "interconnections within the
movement...greed, division of labor, capital and landownership, and the connection of exchange with
competition, of value with the devaluation of men..." (Marx 59).
The relocation of ideology means that knowledge of reality is revisioned. For science, including
political economy, the ability to talk about how something works allows you to talk about reality. For
Marx, the scientific explanation "clarifies nothing. It merely pushes the issue into a gray, misty
distance" (Marx 59). Indeed, Marx imagines society itself as conflict where the authority to give
explanations comes alongside power, "in every epoch the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas,
that is, the class that is the ruling material power of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual
power" (Marx 129). If a theory of ideas cannot talk about why ideas are true or false, it fails to really
interrogate how power constructs reality. To be of any use, then, a discussion of reality has to involve a
theory of causality.
Specifically, Marx's motif is that man's means for subsisting condition the way he constructs his
ideas, "production of ideas...is directly interwoven with the material activity and...relationships of men"
(Marx 111). For him, the way somebody spends his time entirely constitutes his consciousness. So,
because under capitalism men are economically forced into labor, their ideas come to reflect that
coercive relationship. The capitalist earns more from the worker's labor than he pays him, and
accordingly this relationship becomes a part of the worker's ideology. The worker fails to recognize the
injustice of the situation, and so remains in servitude. For Marx, this distortion of the relationship
between labor and product is the classic manifestion of ideology: false consciousness.
The third problem for ideology is how to shed and instigate the shedding of false consciousness,
in other words how to critique ideology. I am going to keep talking about Marx, because his
formulation served as a model for future thinkers, and I will talk about other thinkers later on.
Critically, for Marx, theory had to accompany science, "empirical observation must show empirically,
without any mystification or speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with
production" (Marx 111). His economic writings on value exemplify his methodology concerning the
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critique.
I will summarize one aspect of Marx's economic writings in order to point out how it relates to
his theoretical formulation of the critique. Commodities are the objects of production, a thing that
"through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind" (Marx 220). Marx discusses use and
exchange value in order to get to a critique of ideology. Use value is a totally theoretical notion
meaning the degree to which something is useful. Clearly, we cannot easily quantify use value,
however it is useful as opposed to exchange value. The amount of money something might be sold for
is its exchange value. In other words it is an indicator of equivalency. The two concepts together allow
Marx to talk about commodity fetishism wherein a commodity is attributed exchange value despite a
lack of use value. There is some fundamental logical flaw, Marx concludes, with a system where
something useless is readily exchanged for something useful: something is incorrect about this
equivalency. Thus, the critique of ideology illuminates quantification with a theoretical foundation.
Moving on, I will discuss how later thinkers explored Marx's formulation of ideology and false
consciousness: first, Georg Lukács. Remember that for Marx, man's means for subsisting totally
constitute his consciousness, which allowed him to construct false consciousness on the basis of
capitalist production. Eagleton summarizes Lukács' contention with the Marxist formulation of
consciousness; given that consciousness mirrors material existence "there would seem to be no 'space'
between it and that reality in which false consciousness might germinate" (Eagleton 113). In other
words we have to suppose some sort of gap between consciousness and material reality. The exact
mirror conception of consciousness implies that either, shedding illusion has to start with changing
material reality or the critique of ideology itself somehow actually changes material reality. So for
example, say a Marxist talks with a worker and the ideas are pursuasive to him; if his consciousness
mirrors reality it would seem either that the Marxist's ideas will fail to matter once the worker gets back
to work, because consciousness mirrors reality, or that the Marxist has somehow changed the reality of
the work.
Lukács suggests that we should make a distinction between the materiality of the work and the
worker's subjective experience of it: the subjective experience being the part changed by thru critique.
Thus critique has the capacity to change consciousness even though material reality might not
immediately change. The change becomes symbolic, "in the act of understanding its real conditions, an
oppressed group or class has begun in that very moment to fashion the forms of consciousness which
will contribute to changing them" (Eagleton 114).
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We run into a problem when critique is supposed to change symbolic experience even though
reality remains the same. The consciousness Marxist critique is supposed to create seems degraded,
even a false consciousness itself. In other words, the critique revisions reality in Marxist terms, and the
question is how to account for the fact that material reality often fails to conform to the Marxist vision.
If Marxism happens to falsely predict something, does this mean the reality that replaced false
consciousness was actually false? For Lukács, this problem is realized in the realm of history, as the act
of assigning meanings to events, which increasingly comes to seem relativistic. We no longer have
access to a "universal history" (Lukács 207) given that any history implicates itself within an ideology,
which quite likely involves some falsity.
The first three problems for ideology were: how to study ideas, how to handle ideas that fail to
correspond to reality and how to critique ideology. Lukács problem, how to come upon a notion of true
consciousness, is the fourth.
Karl Mannheim attempts a response to the problem of true consciousness. He says critique
needs to focus on where ideas originate, "there are modes of thought which cannot be adequately
understood as long as their social origins are obscured" (Mannheim 218). Without formulating any true
consciousness to oppose against it, the criticism can to some extent still critique false consciousness by
way of pointing out how it is socially constructed. He says, "the sociology of knowledge seeks to
comprehends thought in the concrete setting of an historical-social situation out of which individually
differentiated thought only very gradually emerges" (Mannheim 219). We can avoid historical
relativism, it seems, by accumlating a really comprehensive history of the origins of ideas.
As Eagleton points out, the accusation is easily made that his theory "merely pushes the
question of relativism back a stage" (Eagleton 122). He avoids relativism at the level of picking out
what exactly constitutes true reality, but finds it again at the level of the attribution of origins. In other
words, the sorting out the origins of ideas involved in his "sociology of knowledge" is just as
ideologically conditioned as is any notion of true consciousness. The reason for talking about
Mannheim's project is that reifies the difficulty of ideology. His theory attempted to neutralize the
problem of 'talking about ideology from within an ideology' by neutralizing the consequence of the
whole matter. Often enough, as happened with Mannheim's theory, relativism disguisedly returns to any
theory that tries to avoid it. Despite the problem of relativism, Mannheim's ideology locating project
soon comes to the foreground in the work of Louis Althusser.
The four problems I mentioned, I think, do not get solved anywhere along the way. Nor should
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it begin to seem like there is a modern notion of ideology towards which these historical analyses were
leading. Indeed, we might propose that ideology is a term kept alive not by its actual existence, but by
the sheer fact of its usefulness. At this point, we can generally formulate the project of ideology: to
offer descriptions of how ideas, individually, collectively or otherwise, exist and operate. We cannot
forget the problems, of metaphysics and of relativism, however hopefully these can be set aside in
order to evaluate the merits of ideological theory. I will finish off my literature review with a discussion
of several prominent approaches to ideology.
First we have Mannheim's "sociology of knowledge" as practiced by Althusser. In "Ideology
and Ideological State Apparatuses" Althusser wants to figure out exactly how ideological conditioning
is involved in maintaining an industrial work force. Remember Marx's conclusion that the labor
exploitation involves ideologically conditioned workers, and also Lukács' contention that
consciousness could not mirror material existence. Althusser navigates these concerns by attempting to
locate ideological conditioning exactly somewhere outside the work place.
Religion, education, the family, the media and culture, he argues, make up a sort of machine
which ensures the reproduction of a certain consciousness. This machine he calls the 'Ideological State
Apparatus'. So, in his analysis of school, for example, he talks about how values are inscribed in
protocol, "children at school...learn the 'rules' of good behaviour,...rules of morality, civic and
professional conscience, which actually means rules of respect for the socio- technical division of
labour and ultimately the rules of the order established by class domination" (Althusser 66). Althusser
makes concrete what Marx had laid out more abstractly. While this sort of theorization stands on shaky
metaphysical ground and easily falls prey to relativism, it has the advantage of being able to represent
tangible parts of society. Accordingly, 'truth' for this type of explication is probably best gauged by the
extent to which its terms persist in popular vocabulary. Althusser exemplifies a succesfuly theory of
this sort given the persistence of his notion of Ideological State Apparatuses in the context of education.
We see this strategy taken even more subjectively in the works of Michel Foucault. At face
value his works are overtly historical, but really that means his works are all the more 'inside ideology'.
Discipline and Punish nicely parallels and extends Althusser's analysis. The most obvious parallel is
how social facts get involved in analysis and interpretation. For Althusser the social facts are eductaion,
religion, family etc. at a general level, whereas Foucault analyzes these same things in micro-practice.
Prison and school architecture, for example, evidence the specific way ideology is conditioned. Here he
identifies the conditions and their function, to "train vigorous bodies, the imperative of health; obtain
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competent officers, the imperative of qualification; create obedient sodiers, the imperative of politics;
prevent debauchery and homosexuality, the imperative of morality" (Foucault 172). He then goes on to
illustrate the minute details which condition ideology toward these goals, "A fourfold reason for
establishing sealed compartments...but also apertures for continuous surveillance" (Foucault 172).
For Foucault, as for Marx and Althusser, ideology is about maintaing society as constructed by
those in power. The advantage, however, of his historical approach over the strictly sociological
approach is that it allows him to negatively construct the preconditions of the status quo. He implicates
himself more heavily in his own ideology than does the sociologist, hence claims that his works are
historically false or biased. Clearly, however, such a project might prospectively really change the way
historical events are thought about.
In the second part of "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" Althusser appropriates
Lacanian psychoanalysis toward an analysis of ideology. Such a strategy we might situatiate opposite
from Foucault as an excercise in conservative practicality. Versus attempting to discuss anything in the
context of reality, Althusser here only explores one theory in the context of another. In short, the
Lacanian triad divides reality into three parts: imaginary, symbolic and real. Essentially, Althusser
situates ideology into the context of Lacan and explores what it might mean, "Ideology represents the
imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence" (Althusser 79). In this
context, man's material conditions constitute the Real, something actually existing in the world. Man's
relation to those conditions, perhaps his self-identification as a 'day laborer', constitute the imaginary:
they exist only in the mind. Althusser then concludes that ideology conditions the imaginary aspect of
labor. The author's achievement here is that he is able to get around the problem of consciousness
Lukács ran into. If man's consciousness is actually subdivided, then we can understand how change
might occur. The critique of ideology, versus changing the real of consciousness, actually corrects the
falsity of man's imaginary consciousness.
Most recently, the psychoanalytic theorist Slovaj Žižek has written extensively about ideology.
His methodology involves psychoanalytic critique alongside the sort of mapping we encountered with
Althusser. What distinguishes Žižek's critique from the others is the degree to which he writes self-
consciously from 'within ideology'. The thing that perhaps typifies his approach is his location of the
'inability to get outside of ideology' within the most seemingly neutral situations. However, he should
not be construed merely as a polemical writer; he has a solution deeply having to do with the idea of
critique as a form of psychoanalytic therapy. I want to talk about him in detail, as his theories are the
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vanguard of ideology today, and any further conversation has to start with him. I will explain several of
Žižek's motif's and attempt to point out how his methods fit in with other philosopher's methods.
Part of his work involves drawing parallels between psychanalysis and theory; this being
valuable in its own right for the sake of clarification. The theorist points out that Freud and Marx
conceived dreams and ideology almost identically, "dreams are nothing other than a particular form of
thinking, made possible by the conditions of the state of sleep" (How Did... 186). Just as the dream is
the manifestation of latent content, Žižek says that commodity is the manifestation of latent ideological
content. Much as the wide interpretive scope afforded by dream analysis becomes a catch all analytic
tool,"the commodity-form presents us with a...mechanism offering us a key to the theoretical
understanding of phenomena which, at first sight, have nothing whatsoever to do with the field of
political economy" (How Did...187).
For Žižek, the core of ideology is a lack, much as Lacanian psychoanalysis situates a lack at the
core of neurosis. For Lacan, reality is somehow lost when it gets symbolized in language, and that is
the hole constitutive of neurosis. Žižek approriates this idea apropos ideology, "ideology is not simply
a 'false consciousness', an illusory representation of reality; it is, rather, this reality itself which is
already to be conceived as 'ideological' -- 'ideological' is a social reality whose very existence implies
the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence" (How Did... 190). The surprising thing about
this is that he takes the problem we encountered with Mannheim, namely the persistence of relativism,
and then goes on to claim that that problem is the exact nature of ideology. Pushing that notion to its
conclusion, he makes a comparison between the critique of ideology, and the symptom in
psychoanalysis. Much like the symptom, he says, ideology "consists in detecting a point of breakdown
heterogeneous to a given ideological field and at the same time necessary for that field to achieve its
closure, its accomplished form" (How Did... 190).
He argues ideology necessarily involves at least a single instance that is exception to its own
rules, and it is that exception which allows us to detect the existence of ideology in what might have
been total reality. The exception, "lays open its falsity" (How Did...190). The discussion of ideology
having gone on for a long time now, most people have inevitably come upon exceptions by now.
Žižek's contention is that despite the being self-aware of ideology, people mostly continue to operate
under it, and this he calls cynicism as ideology. Ideological subjects reject the notion that they should
shed the ideological "mask", for reasons of cynicism we might suppose. For example, the capitalist
maintains capitalist ideology based on some fundamental cynicism about human nature, 'humans are
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naturally greed' perhaps.

For Žižek, cynical ideology means the criticism of ideology no longer works, "We can no longer
subject the ideological text to 'symptomatic reading', confronting it with its blank spots...cynical reason
takes this distance into account in advance" (How Did... 195). Cynical ideology relocates the illusion of
ideology within the act of doing, instead of the Marxist notion of false ideas. Today, people know that
ideology obfuscates power relations, what they fail to recognize is that they still operate as if they did
not know. Accordingly, the the critique needs to be revised such that it confronts the subject with his
the fact of his own actions.
Like Lacan, the solution Žižek comes to is that we need to find some way to be resigned to a
fundamental lack of reality. "The ideological dream" he says, is construed as " a dreamlike construction
hindering us from seeing the real state of things, reality as such" (How Did... 202) The cure, then is "to
confront the Real of our desire which announces itself in this dream" (How Did 203). Whereas for
Lacan, neurosis comes from an incessant desire for an unattainable reality, for ideology, the incessant
desire is for an extra-ideological perspective. Žižek says the extra-ideological is an impossibility.
Critically, this does not mean we lack the ability to distinguish and choose between different
ideologies: the most important thing we can do is acknowledge the persistence of ideology and analyze
it, rather than be immobilized and dominated by the persistence of the status quo.
Žižek's theory, for me, really speaks to education today. We have to suppose that some portion
of university professors are the sort of cynics Žižek mentions. Professors are the top educated class, and
if Žižek is right it would seem that most of them must have become conscious of the fact that they
operate 'within ideology'. Optimistically, we would expect then that education would exist as a place
where contrary ideology exists, but instead we find an institution just as much about dominant ideology
as any other. Žižek's theory does a lot to explain that situation, and indeed my experience as a student
confirms the truth of it. Professors 'know they are doing it are still doing it'. For example, professors
often really seem to have a problem with grading; it discourages a focus on content in exchange for a
focus on material consequences and marginalizes the underprepared. The problem is that they still
grade in their classes! Žižek might suppose, as solution, a situation wherein the professor is radically
confronted with the fact of her own grading policy as solution.
The objection still to be raised is that all of these discussions of ideology since Tracy's have
departed into shaky metaphysical territory. Can we prove that any of these concepts actually exist? To
answer that, we should ask, metaphysically, what sort of thing is Marx or Althusser proposing. One of
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the things Marx focuses on is 'consciousness', but what I think he means by it is a set of beliefs
common to come strata of people. We would likely be able to try to evidence such a thing with a survey
or some such scientific tool. We might more accurately suppose consciousness is more like a cluster of
beliefs, not each belief being held by each member, by some abstract dominant consensus on certain
points. But really, that is not the sort of proof a metaphysician is looking for anyway. Clearly, we
cannot point to consciousness, pick it out in the world. We would even be hard pressed to identify a
single habit or practice that proves its presence, election results perhaps? The metaphysician's
contention essentially references a question of justification.
Marxism presents a compelling case for ideology because it seems to match up with reality in
some fundamental way. There are cases where his theory plain lacks predictive validity, but this fails to
really undermine its descriptive resonance. In defense of the metaphysical objection, Marxism should
respond that it never really means to assert anything metaphysically at all. The value of Marxism is
constructed differently, it lives elsewhere. The value of Marxism is that it confronts the political status
quo and challenges it to be better.
In the first part of my paper I set up four problems around which the concept of 'ideology'
revolves: how to study ideas, how to deal with ideas that fail to correspond to reality, how to shed false
consciousness and how to ascertain the nature of true consciousness. In the latter part, I discussed
Althusser, Foucault and Žižek's more recent theories of ideology. I intended this paper to be an
accesible introduction for someone intimidated by the highly allusive nature of source texts. I regard
Žižek's psychoanalytic theory of ideology as the most pursuasive, and suggest that the metaphysical
objection to Marxism fails to be a real problem.
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Works Cited
Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." Mapping Ideology. Slovaj Zizek
ed. Verso: London, 1994. 64-89. pdf file
Eagleton, Terry. "Ideology and its Vicissitudes in Western Marxism." Mapping Ideology. Slovaj Zizek
ed. Verso: London, 1994. pdf file
Foucault, Michel. "Discipline and Punish." Alan Sheridan trans. Pantheon: New York, 1977. Print.
"How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?" Žižek, Slovaj. Mapping Ideology. Slovaj Zizek ed. Verso:
London, 1994. pdf file
Kennedy, Emmet. "'Ideology' From Destutt De Tracy to Marx." Journal of the History of Ideas 40.3
(1979). JSTOR. Web. 13 Dec. 2010. pdf file
Locke, John. "Of Ideas." Eassy Concerning Human Understanding. Web.
http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/locke/locke1/Book2a.html
Lukács, Georg. "The Irrational Chasm Between Subject and Object." Social Theory: The Multicultural
and Classic Readings 4th Ed. 206-208. Charles Lemert ed. Westview Press: Boulder, 2010. Print
Mannheim, Karl. "The Sociology of Knowledge and Ideology." Social Theory: The Multicultural
and Classic Readings 4th Ed. 218-221. Charles Lemert ed. Westview Press: Boulder, 2010. Print
Marx, Karl. "Selected Writings." Lawrence H. Simon ed. Hackett: Indianapolis, 1994. Print
Sypnowich, Christine."Law and Ideology." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 28 Jul. 2010. Web. 12
Dec. 2010.