Ideology

David Hawkes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415290111
• eBook ISBN: 9781134437740
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Any literary student who is new to the terminology and uses of critical terms will welcome David Hawkes' Ideology, a comprehensive and concise overview. In refreshingly clear and jargon-free prose, Hawkes:
* Considers the myriad definitions and meanings of ideology
* Traces the history of the term and the debates which surround it, from Martin Luther and Machiavelli to present-day debates in feminism and psychoanalysis
* Provides literary examples and illustrations to illuminate and clarify his argument
* Asks whether, in the face of post-war capitalism and postmodernism, the ideology debate is obsolete, or is still very much relevant in contemporary debates

1
ORIGINS

Among them he a spirit of phrenzie sent,
Who hurt their minds,
And urg’d them on with mad desire
To call in haste for their destroyer

( John Milton, Samson Agonistes, 1673, ll. 1675–8)

IDOLATRY

Twin colossi once stood at the centre of world trade. To the merchants and brokers who gazed on them as they went about their business, the two enormous structures must have seemed emblems of an entire civilization. Perhaps this was why the Taliban government of Afghanistan made the destruction of the twin statues, the Buddhas of Bamiyan, one of their highest priorities. Ruling a war-torn nation with no infrastructure and paltry food supplies, they nevertheless devoted an incredible amount of time and effort to the removal of these icons. It was far from easy: the statues were hewed from solid rock, 53 and 38 metres tall, and they had presided over that part of the ancient Silk Road for 1,500 years. The Taliban treated them as physical enemies, blasting them with rockets, mortars and tank shells, drilling holes in their heads and filling them with dynamite, burning tyres on their lips in order to blacken their faces. Finally, in May 2001, they succeeded in destroying their stone foes, thus ironically proving the truth of the Buddha’s central teaching that nothing on earth can aspire to permanence.

The Taliban Minister of Culture responded to the consequent international protests by remarking, somewhat dejectedly, that: ‘The statues are no big issue. They are only objects made of mud and stone.’ This, it appears, is a defect that agents of his government remedied six months later with the more terrible abnegation of the dual symbol of another civilization. The destruction of the Buddhas, it emerged, had been merely an admonitory rehearsal for the most ferocious act of iconoclasm since the seventeenth century. The people who sent this message were fanatics straight out of Dostoevsky’s Devils, but the message itself was clear enough. The citadels of capital, we were being told, were idols of the same nature as the Bamiyan Buddhas, and the Western world’s adoration of money repeated the sin, and invited the fate, that monotheistic religions have assigned to idolaters since the demolition of the golden calf at Sinai.

History shows that all philosophical or ideological developments call forth their own refutation. In Europe between 1700 and 1800, for example, religious faith was challenged by enlightened reason, which in turn provoked the reaction of Romanticism. This process involves a series of clashes between binary oppositions, but it would be naive (and ideological) to see these oppositions as mutually exclusive. On the contrary, the struggle between opposites reveals their mutual dependence, and the result of the struggle is never the victory of one side and the extirpation of the other, but rather the emergence of an entirely new element, forged from their collision. If today there is an aggressive spirit of iconoclasm abroad in the world, it has been summoned by the apparently complete triumph of its antithesis: idolatry.

In the past, civilizations have generally evolved sophisticated criteria to demonstrate the errors of their victims or rivals. The Greeks declared foreigners to be uncivilized, primitive barbarians who lacked the capacity for rational thought; the early Christians portrayed pagans as worldly, sinful idolaters, addicted to the things of this world and the pleasures of the flesh. It is beyond the scope of this book to analyse such ancient discourses in detail. For our purposes the relevant task is to describe the theories of false consciousness which typify the modern and postmodern worlds. In order to do this, however, we will first need to mention the essential Greek and biblical conceptions of the relation between spirit and matter.

The sacred books of all three monotheistic religions take the oscillation between idolatry and iconoclasm as their primary theme, and they all condemn idolatry on the grounds that it involves the adoration of the products of human labour. The fetishization of the products of labour is the great, all-encompassing sin of humanity. Such idolatry involves a fetishistic attitude towards the self, it implies the objectification of the human subject. Psalm 135 is typical:

The idols of the heathen are silver and gold, the works of men’s hands.

They have mouths, but they speak not; eyes have they, but they see not;

They have ears, but they hear not; neither is there any breath in their mouths.

They that make them are like unto them: so is every one that trusteth in them.

(ll. 15–18)

In Judaism, Christianity and Islam, to take an image for true reality is the most heinous of all sins. In Greek philosophy, it is the most damaging of all epistemological errors. It is the error of the prisoners in Plato’s cave and of those who substitute material causes for Aristotle’s telos. It is also the predominant, even the definitive, characteristic of postmodern society. It is often remarked that our society is dominated by the ‘economy’, and that this ‘economy’ is dominated by money. The most salient characteristic of money is that it does not exist. Or rather, it exists only as a symbol, an idea in people’s minds, as opposed to a physical object that one could see or touch. Money, in short, is an image that has attained the status of reality: it is an idol.

The Hebraic tradition, which along with Hellenic thought is the primal influence on Western philosophy, ascribes false consciousness to a misconstrual of the relation between matter and spirit. In the Hebrew Bible, the Israelites are distinguished from the Gentiles by the prohibition on material representations of their deity. Due to the attraction which sensual things hold for fallen humanity, such representations will inevitably become fetishes; that is, people will forget that they are merely representations, and idolize them, venerating them as though they were incarnations of the divine. Yahweh makes this clear when, in the first two commandments, He makes the abandonment of images a precondition of monotheism:

Exodus 20:3. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. 4. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. 5. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.

The ferocity of the aniconic commandment is necessary because, due to our faulty understanding of the relation between signs and things, we will inevitably mistake an image of God for God Himself. Representations of the deity are thus incompatible with Judaic monotheism, which asserts that the source of all meaning is an absolute logos which is necessarily incorporeal. It is therefore fundamentally erroneous to worship an image. But it is also immoral to do so, for two reasons. First of all, an image is a material object, and thus ethically inferior to the ideal dimension of the divine. Second, an image is the product of human labour – it has been ‘graven’, or manufactured. In worshipping an icon, then, we are really worshipping the objectified manifestation of our own labour.

This aspect of idolatry was particularly stressed under the Babylonian captivity. The book of Isaiah contains lengthy descriptions of the various kinds of labour which go into manufacturing the Babylonian icons, and the fact that they have been produced by human labour is cited as the clearest possible proof of the absurdity of worshipping images:

Isaiah 41:18. To whom then will ye liken God? Or what likeness will ye compare unto him? 19. The workman melteth a graven image, and the goldsmith spreadeth it over with gold, and casteth silver chains. 20. He that is so impoverished that he hath no oblation chooseth a tree that will not rot; he seeketh unto him a cunning workman to prepare a graven image, that shall not be moved.

Isaiah 46:5. To whom will ye liken me, and make me equal, and compare me, that we may be like? 6. They lavish gold out of the bag, and weigh silver in the balance, and hire a goldsmith; and he maketh it a god: they fall down, yea, they worship.

What is being criticized here is the attempt to establish an equivalence between the ideal and the material through the use of representation. Such an enterprise succeeds only in fetishizing the products of human labour, bestowing upon them a superstitious power and an illegitimate influence over human life. In the New Testament, the Hebraic proscription of idols blends with Hellenic idealism, issuing in a generalized mistrust of all earthly perception, which will only be corrected by posthumous heavenly revelation. Thus Paul, writing to the Corinthians: ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as I am known’ (I Cor. 13:12).

The centuries immediately before and after the birth of Christ witnessed a syncretic union between Greek rationalism and Jewish monotheism, and Christianity is its most momentous progeny. Philo Judaeus was one thinker who consciously tried to unite the Greek and Hebrew traditions. In his view, God could be equated with Plato’s Absolute Idea, and as such He could have no effect on the world that He made possible. The world, rather, was created and governed by God’s ‘reason’, ‘word’, or logos. Logos is the term used in the Gospel of John to designate what Christianity metaphorically calls the ‘son’ of God. The notion that this logos could be incarnated in human form indicates a yearning to escape the false consciousness of the flesh, but the earthly fate of Jesus of Nazareth implied that no such liberation was possible in this world.

IRRATIONALISM

Greek philosophy eventually arrived at the same pessimism as Christianity regarding the possibility of achieving a true consciousness on earth, although its route to this destination was long and circuitous. The concept of a systematically false consciousness predates philosophy. At first, it is identified with a particular kind of person rather than with a specific mode of thought. For example, Homer’s Iliad (circa 720 BC) begins with two challenges to the authority of King Agamemnon. In book I, Achilles attacks his tyrannical rule and inequitable lust for plunder, and Thersites criticizes him on identical grounds in book II. There is a marked difference, however, in the ways in which the two rebels are treated. The dispute between Agamemnon and Achilles is presented as a conflict between equals, and the rebellious soldier is accorded as much deference and respect as the proud monarch. Thersites’ harangue is indistinguishable in content from Achilles’, but his outburst is met with scornful laughter and a blow from Agamemnon’s sceptre, wielded by Ulysses. The difference is not in their arguments but in the propriety of their speaking. While Achilles is of semi-divine descent, Thersites’ physical ugliness associates him with the lower social ranks, and hence his intervention is unequivocally located outside the realm of acceptable discourse.

In Socrates, by contrast, physical ugliness is said to reflect a laudable commitment to matters of the mind rather than the body. With the development of abstract speculation about concepts – that is to say, of philosophy – the veridical status of consciousness ceased to be connected to personal qualities and was instead equated with the ability to think rationally. In philosophy, very broadly, thinkers tend to claim that others are mistaken by trying to show that they have misunderstood the relation between matter and ideas. The opposition between idealism and materialism structures Western philosophy from its very inception.

The earliest philosophers, known as the Ionics, were materialists who denied the reality of ideas, and also monists who reduced all life and thought to one element. Thales (circa 620–550 BC) argued that all things were forms of water, while Anaximenes (circa 590–520 BC) claimed that the fundamental principle of the universe was air. Later, by contrast, the Orphics and Pythagoreans concentrated their attention on the soul, which they claimed was spiritual rather than material, and whose purpose was to escape from the material world. These schools therefore preached asceticism and the illusory nature of transient matter. The tendency, which we discussed in the Introduction, to reduce the opposition between ideas and matter to one of its elements is thus as old as Western philosophy itself.

The first thinker to refract the opposition between matter and ideas into an internal contradiction within the human mind was Parmenides (born circa 510 BC). He argued that our minds are divided between the senses and reason, with the former responding to the world of matter and the latter inhabiting the realm of ideas. Parmenides gave ethical precedence to the rational function. He regarded reason as the ‘way of truth’, and sense experience as leading to error, via the ‘way of opinion’. The philosophical distinction between truth and falsehood thus originally derives from the dichotomy between matter and spirit. The world of sense experience is illusory, and reality must be sought in the extrasensory operations of reason.

Philosophers after Parmenides can be divided into three groups: those who hold that matter is the true reality, those who claim that the true reality lies in ideas and those who deny the distinction between matter and ideas altogether. Democritus (circa 460–370 BC) is an example of the first approach. In his opinion, which is shared by modern science, everything in the universe is made up of atoms which, although invisible, are material. In contrast, Anaxagoras (circa 500–430 BC) argued that the universe was created and is moved by an all-powerful mind, or nous. Democritus, that is to say, was a mechanist, who sought material, mechanical causes of effects, while Anaxagoras had a teleological approach to the world, viewing it as the product of intelligent design. Where mechanism explains things by studying their origins at a microscopic level, teleology explains things by examining their end or final purpose: their telos.

We can find a more recent instance of this debate in the nineteenthcentury controversy over natural selection. Pre-Darwinian evolutionists such as William Paley, whose Natural Theology [1802] was for fifty years the most highly respected work of evolutionary theory, observed that living organisms had, through evolution, become perfectly adapted to their environments. A process of natural selection was thus indisputably at work. Paley’s reflections on the fact were teleological in nature. He asked why such exquisite adaptation occurred, and he was inexorably led to the conclusion that the universe has an intelligent designer, whom he labelled the ‘great watch-maker’. In the Origin of Species [1859], Charles Darwin examined the same data as Paley from a materialist perspective. For Darwin, the competitive adaptation of individual organisms to their environment was the only cause of evolution. He therefore posited a mechanistic universe with no place for any directing intelligence or nous. The difference between Paley and Darwin is thus essentially methodological. The same data led them to such divergent conclusions because they sought after different causes. Paley sought the final cause of evolution and found it in the design of nous, while Darwin looked for evolution’s material cause, which he found in the principle of ‘the survival of the fittest’. As he freely admitted, Darwin reached this conclusion by applying the economic theories of Thomas Malthus and Adam Smith to the natural world. The conclusions even of scientists are determined by the methodology they employ.

Today, most natural science and philosophy are committed to the mechanistic, materialist approach to truth. The world as it is perceived by the senses is, to most philosophers as well as to the general public, the real world. But this does not seem to result in any agreement about the nature of that world, or about the role of human beings within it. On the contrary, the twenty-first century is characterized by an extreme relativism with regard to questions of truth and falsehood, and this sceptical attitude is reinforced by an emphasis on the determining power of representation. People often have the impression that scientific empiricism is somehow opposed to linguistic determinism. This notion is encouraged by such cases as the ‘Sokal affair’ of 1996, in which a physicist tricked the editors of the postmodernist journal Social Text into printing his parodic argument for the arbitrary nature of scientific truth. In fact, however, empiricist natural scientists and postmodernist philosophers share the assumption that surface appearances constitute the only knowable reality. Scientists examine the world as it is immediately given to the senses, while postmodernist philosophers claim that immediately perceptible signs construct our experience of the world.

For a historical example of how these approaches can happily cohabit, we can turn to the group of ancient philosophers known as the Sophists. They were not a unified school of thinkers, and our knowledge of them is largely filtered through the fierce criticisms of Plato and Aristotle. Broadly speaking, however, the Sophists agreed that sense perception was more reliable than rational ideas and also, in an argument that would be picked up by Nietzsche, that truth was merely the effect of the subtle manipulation of linguistic or rhetorical techniques. They did not believe in absolute truth, but claimed that truth was radically contingent. They thought of themselves as practising the art of persuasion rather than as following the path to objective truth, and one of the reasons for their castigation by the followers of Socrates was the fact that they happily commodified this art, selling their rhetorical skills to the highest bidder.

The Sophists have frequently, and plausibly, been identified as precursors of postmodernism. Jacques Derrida’s essays on such Platonic dialogues as the Gorgias argue that Plato himself has recourse to rhetorical shifts in order to refute his Sophist opponents in the name of a spuriously absolute truth. For Derrida the history of Western philosophy is, as A.N. Whitehead famously put it, a series of footnotes to Plato. But Derrida believes that those footnotes comment on a basically fallacious text. The Platonic dream of an absolute distinction between truth and falsehood has, many would argue, finally been exposed as illusory by the brutal facts of the postmodern condition, and the subjectivist relativism of Shakespeare’s Hamlet rings out across the centuries: ‘There’s nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so’ (II, ii, 259).

Works of ‘New Historicist’ literary criticism such as Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-fashioning (1983) have convincingly argued that the literature of the early modern period prefigures postmodernity’s concern with the indeterminacy and relativism of truth. Shakespeare’s plays are particularly rich in this regard. Hamlet, for example, is regarded by his friends and family as insane. The play’s audience is asked to consider whether he is really crazy or just pretending, and Shakespeare leads us to the conclusion that it does not much matter. Hamlet seems to be insane, and in the moral universe he heralds, appearance and reality have become indistinguishable. In fact, his insanity is defined by his inability to distinguish between reality and appearance, as in his rebuke to his mother: ‘Seems, Madam! Nay, it is; I know not “seems” ’ (I, ii, 77). In Macbeth, the witches prophesy the collapse of binary oppositions, telling of a world where ‘Fair is foul and foul is fair’ (I, i, 11). The Tempest gives an insight into the mutual dependence of moral relativism and mechanistic empiricism. The villain Antonio describes his usurpation of power in the duchy of Milan. ‘But for your conscience?’ asks his confidant. ‘Ay sir,’ replies Antonio, ‘where lies that? If ’twere a kibe, / ‘Twould put me to my slipper; but I feel not / This deity in my bosom’ (II, i, 275–8). The conscience is not an empirically perceptible thing, like a ‘kibe’ or chilblain, and for this reason Antonio concludes that it does not exist, and that he therefore has licence to act on his subjective desires. In King Lear the evil Edmund declares a similar subjective secession from objective morality when he announces ‘all with me’s meet that I can fashion fit’ (I, iv, 183–4).

In Shakespeare’s time, such relativist materialism was often called ‘sophistical’. Whereas the Sophists founded knowledge on sense perception, Socrates and his pupil Plato founded it upon reason – that is to say, on an objective rather than a subjective approach to truth. All theories of false consciousness claim that it is produced by an imbalance in the relationship between the subject (which is the realm of ideas) and the object (the world of substantial, material things). When one set of ideas intends to label another as false, it generally declares that its opponen...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• SERIES EDITOR’ S PREFACE
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION: Ideology and Globalization
• 1: ORIGINS
• 2: EMPIRICISM
• 3: IDEALISM
• 4: MARXISM
• 5: POST-MARXISM
• 6: POSTMODERNISM
• 7: IDEOLOGY AFTER 11 SEPTEMBER
• GLOSSARY
• FURTHER READING
• BIBLOGRAPHY