Film Ideology资料文件与下载

Theories of ideology are an attempt to understand ideas in terms of power. This has been most fully developed with Marxist theory and what follows is a consideration of that tradition and critiques of it. Raymond Williams stresses the various meanings that the term “ideology” can have from explicitly acknowledged political ideologies to more subsconscious “common-sensical meaning” or “taken-for-granted beliefs”. He identifies two components to Marxist understandings of ideology:

  ideology as the ideas of a particular social group

  ideology as a system of illusory beliefs

Ideology as the ideas of a particular social group

This is the argument that social groups (and within Marxism the debate has revolved mainly around social classes) have particular beliefs associated with them. One source of this is Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels’s The German Ideology. In this critique of idealism (a way of thinking that identifies ideas as the main properties of a society) they asserted that ideas were not independent. Instead ideologies come from social classes in their social relations with each other. Or, as Janet Wolff says, “the ideas and beliefs people have are systematically related to their actual and material conditions of existence”. 

Ideas, or ideologies, are seen to be rooted in the material conditions of the everyday life of classes (including their relations with other classes). Yet these classes are not equal; some ideas dominate because of the unequal material social relations of a class-based society. Marx sums this up in a famous phrase: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force”. Indeed, these ideas are part of their rule. They serve to legitimate their domination and to reproduce the unequal social relations from which they benefit.

Generally, then, ideology (the realm of ideas) is seen to be shaped by something “deeper”—the social (or class) relations within which people live their lives or even the economic organization of society (or “mode of production”) which shapes those class relations. There is, however, a recognition that ideologies have real consequences. They operate as “maps of meaning”, used to interpret and define what is going on. That they work better for some groups than others is the second component of Marxist theories that Williams identifies.

Ideology as a system of illusory beliefs

    This is the suggestion that. because of their origins as part of unequal social relations, ideologies are a distorted representation of the truth. This relies on the points set out above to argue that there are sets of ideas appropriate to each class, generated by their ideas via education, the media, entertainment and so on. Since a true class consciousness with an objective material basis is being claimed here, then people who do not think that way are said to have “false consciousness”. There is a sense that they have been hoodwinked. Their real interests are concealed (for example, nationalism which serves the political, military and economic interests of ruling classes might be said to be false consciousness for a working class that “should” think of itself not as divided by as internationally united.)

    There are a series of problems with these ways of thinking. First, “false consciousness” is always something that someone else has, not oneself. It has a tendency to define people as “cultural dupes” who can be led out of their ignorance by a right-thinking vanguard or the visionary theorist who knows the “Truth”. Second, can classes and ideas be matched as neatly as this way of thinking suggested? Can we allocate ideologies to social groups in this way? Third, can the world be understood in terms of class alone? If not, do the forms of analysis (often rooted in understanding economic relationships) set out above work for social groups defined in terms of gender, race, sexuality or age?

    In response to these problems the 1970s and 1980s saw the development of more and more elaborate and difficult theoretical work on the relationships between ideas and power. The main path that this took was through understanding language, thinking about ideas not as something “free-floating” but as existing as words spoken or written. It also meant a move away from only studying class.

    This work has stressed that ideology is about the relationship between language and power. Instead of thinking about ideas being fixed to particular social groups or about them being untrue there is a sense that meanings are not fixed, that they arise in language, in communication and representation. This means think about many competing ideologies, not one dominant one, and about a whole range of social groups. The connection to power lies in the ways in which meanings present the world to the advantage or disadvantage of particular social groups, and the ways in which those groups can attempt to fix or challenge those meanings. For example, a set of widespread ideas about nature, motherhood and domesticity which served to legitimate women’s dependence within the home benefited and were reproduced by men, but have in many ways been effectively challenged by women. As Thompson says: “To study ideology, I propose, is to study the ways in which meaning (or signification) serves to sustain relations of domination”.

This way of thinking is very close to other theoretical concepts that look at the relations between meaning and power (e.g. discourse) and has raised the question of whether we still need the concept of ideology. Those arguing against using it suggest that it still brings with it the problems of believing in something called “the truth”, and of being too rooted in economic class relations. Those who want to retain it claim that it brings a necessary critical edge to making judgments about the power relations involved in statements.

    Excerpt from Elaine Baldwin Introducing Cultural Studies (2005)