Theories of ideology : the powers of alienation and subjection

358 Pages·2013·1.17 MB·English

by  Rehmann

Theories of Ideology
Historical
Materialism
Book Series
Editorial Board
Sébastien Budgen, Paris – Steve Edwards, London
Marcel van der Linden, Amsterdam – Peter Thomas, London
VOLUME 54
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/hm
Theories of Ideology
The Powers of Alienation and Subjection
By
Jan Rehmann
LEIdEn • BOSTOn
2013
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data
Rehmann, Jan.
 Theories of ideology : the powers of alienation and subjection / by Jan Rehmann.
  pages cm. — (Historical materialism book series, 1570–1522 ; 54)
 Includes bibliographical references and index.
 ISBn 978-90-04-25230-1 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBn 978-90-04-25231-8 (e-book) 1. Ideology.
I. Title.
 HM641.R44 2013
 140—dc23
2013019486
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ISSn 1570-1522
ISBn 978-90-04-25230-1 (hardback)
ISBn 978-90-04-25231-8 (e-book)
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Contents
Introduction  ................................................................................................................. 1
1. Twisted Preliminaries: The ‘Idéologistes’ and napoleon  .......................... 15
1.1. Ideology as a ‘natural science’ of ideas  .................................................. 15
1.2. A post-Jacobin state-ideology  ................................................................... 17
1.3. napoleon’s pejorative concept of ideology  .......................................... 18
2. Ideology-Critique and Ideology-Theory According to Marx and
Engels  ........................................................................................................................ 21
2.1. From ‘inverted consciousness’ to ‘idealistic superstructures’  ......... 22
2.1.1. The camera obscura and its critics  ............................................ 22
2.1.2. A ‘naive sensuous empiricism’?  .................................................. 23
2.1.3. Excursus to the young Marx’s critique of religion  ................ 26
2.1.4. Camera obscura as metaphor for ‘idealistic
 superstructure’  ............................................................................ 29
2.1.5. ‘Ruling ideas’ and ‘conceptive ideologists’  .............................. 32
2.2. The critique of fetishism in the Critique of Political Economy  ........ 34
2.2.1. From the critique of religion to the critique of
 fetishism  ........................................................................................ 35
2.2.2. From ideology-critique to the critique of ‘objective
 thought-forms’  ............................................................................. 41
2.2.3. The wage-form and the ‘true Eden’ of human rights  ........... 44
2.2.4. Capital-fetishism, the ‘trinity formula’ and the ‘religion
 of everyday life’  ........................................................................... 46
2.2.5. The ‘silent compulsion’ of economic rule as ideology?  ....... 48
2.2.6. ‘Science’ between ideology and ideology-critique  ................ 52
2.3. did Marx develop a ‘neutral’ concept of ideology?  ........................... 55
2.4. Engels’s concept of ‘ideological powers’  ............................................... 58
3. The Concept of Ideology from the Second International to
‘Marxism-Leninism’  .............................................................................................. 61
3.1. The repression of a critical concept of ideology  ................................ 61
vi • Contents
3.2. Lenin: bourgeois or socialist ideology?  .................................................. 63
3.3. Lenin’s ‘operative’ approach: self-determination and
 hegemony  .................................................................................................. 67
3.4. Ideology in ‘Marxist-Leninist’ state-philosophy  .................................. 69
3.5. ‘Ideological relationships’ in the philosophy of East Germany  ..... 72
4. The Concept of Ideology from Lukács to the Frankfurt School  ............. 77
4.1. György Lukács: ideology as reification  .................................................. 78
4.2. Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s critique of the ‘culture-industry’  ....... 84
4.3. Abandoning the concept of ideology?  ................................................... 90
4.4. The ‘gears of an irresistible praxis’  .......................................................... 92
4.5. Ideology as ‘instrumental reason’ and ‘identitarian thought’  ......... 95
4.6. From Marcuse to Habermas – and back to Max Weber?  ................ 99
4.7. Taking the sting out of critical theory  ................................................... 104
4.8. ‘Commodity-aesthetics’ as ideological promise of happiness  ........ 111
5. The Concept of Ideology in Gramsci’s Theory of Hegemony  .................. 117
5.1. A significant shift in translation  .............................................................. 118
5.2. Gramsci’s critical concept of ideology  ................................................... 119
5.3. The critique of common sense as ideology-critique  ......................... 126
5.4. Gramsci’s concept of ‘organic ideology’  ................................................ 132
5.5. ‘Ideology’ as a category of transition toward a theory of
 hegemony  .................................................................................................. 134
5.6. The critique of corporatism and Fordism  ............................................ 139
5.7. A new type of ideology-critique on the basis of a theory of
 hegemony  .................................................................................................. 143
6. Louis Althusser: Ideological State-Apparatuses and Subjection  ............. 147
6.1. The relationship to Gramsci  ..................................................................... 147
6.2. The theory of ideological state-apparatuses (ISA)  ............................. 149
6.3. A debate on ‘functionalism’  ...................................................................... 152
6.4. ‘Ideology in general’ and subject-constitution  .................................... 155
6.5. The derivation of the ‘imaginary’ from Spinoza and Lacan  ............ 160
6.6. Lacan’s universalisation of subjection and alienation  ...................... 165
6.7. Can subjects talk back at interpellations?  ............................................ 173
7. From the Collapse of the Althusser School to Poststructuralism and
Postmodernism  ...................................................................................................... 179
7.1. Michel Pêcheux’s discourse-theoretical development of
 Althusser’s ideology-theory  .................................................................. 180
7.2. The post-Marxist turn of Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe  ........ 185
Contents • vii
7.3. Stuart Hall: bridging the theory of hegemony and
 discourse-analysis  .................................................................................... 187
7.4. Michel Foucault’s neo-nietzschean trajectory from ideology to
 discourse to power  .................................................................................. 190
7.4.1. A peculiar nietzschean-Heideggerian strand of
 ‘anti-humanism’  ......................................................................... 191
7.4.2. The dissolution of Althusser’s concept of ideology into
 ‘knowledge’  .................................................................................. 195
7.4.3. The substitution of ideology-critique by ‘fictionalism’  ....... 198
7.4.4. The introduction of a neo-nietzschean concept of
 power  ............................................................................................. 201
7.4.5. ‘Relational power’ or ‘phagocytic essence’?  ............................ 204
7.4.6. Foucault’s ‘dispositif ’ and the ‘technologies’ of power –
 a re-interpretation  ..................................................................... 207
7.5. Poststructuralism and postmodernism  ................................................. 210
7.5.1. Questions of definition  ................................................................. 210
7.5.2. Postmodernism’s essentialist definition of modernity  ........ 211
7.5.3. A component of neoliberal ideology?  ...................................... 214
7.5.4. Theoretical loss: the dematerialisation of social life  ........... 217
8. Pierre Bourdieu: ‘Field’, ‘Habitus’ and ‘Symbolic Violence’  ...................... 221
8.1. The development of the concept of field from the German
 Ideology  ....................................................................................................... 223
8.2. Field against apparatus?  ............................................................................. 225
8.3. Ideology, symbolic violence, habitus – disentangling a confused
 arrangement  .............................................................................................. 229
8.4. Bourdieu’s contribution to the development of Althusser’s
 model of interpellation  .......................................................................... 233
8.5. A new determinism?  ................................................................................... 236
9. Ideology-Critique with the Hinterland of a Theory of the Ideological:
The ‘Projekt Ideologietheorie’ (PIT)  ................................................................... 241
9.1. The resumption of Marx and Engels’s critical concept of
 ideology  ...................................................................................................... 241
9.2. The ideological at the crossroads of class-domination, state
 and patriarchy  .......................................................................................... 245
9.3. ‘Vergesellschaftung’ – vertical, horizontal, and proto-ideological  248
9.4. The dialectics of the ideological: compromise-formation,
 complementarity and antagonistic reclamation of the
 common  ..................................................................................................... 254
9.5. Fascistic modifications of the ideological  ............................................. 261
viii • Contents
9.6. Policies of extermination and church-struggle in
 nazi Germany  ..................................................................................... 266
9.7. Further ideology-theoretical studies  ................................................ 268
10. Friedrich Hayek and the Ideological Dispositif of neoliberalism  ........ 271
10.1. The formation of neoliberal hegemony  ........................................... 272
10.2. Hayek’s frontal attack on ‘social justice’  ......................................... 275
10.3. Overcoming ‘economy’ by the game of ‘catallaxy’  ....................... 277
10.4. Hayek’s construct of ‘negative’ justice  ............................................. 279
10.5. The religious structure of Hayek’s market-radicalism  ................ 283
10.6. A symptomatic contradiction between market-destiny and
 subject-mobilisation  ......................................................................... 286
10.7. State and liberty: neoliberal discourse is permeated by its
 opposite  ................................................................................................ 287
10.8. The road to ‘disciplinary neoliberalism’  .......................................... 292
10.9. Is the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism exhausted?  ................ 296
11. The Unfulfilled Promises of the Late Foucault and Foucauldian
‘Governmentality-Studies’  ................................................................................ 301
11.1. Foucault’s mediation of the techniques of domination and
 of the self  ............................................................................................. 302
11.2. The enigmatic content of the concept of governmentality  ...... 305
11.3. Eliminating the inner contradictions of neoliberal ideology  ..... 310
11.4. A problematic equation of subjectivation and subjection  ........ 314
11.5. Towards an ideology-theoretical re-interpretation of
 ‘governmentality-studies’  ................................................................ 316
References  ..................................................................................................................... 319
Person Index  ................................................................................................................. 339
Subject Index  ................................................................................................................ 344
Introduction
I
When the economic crisis hit in September 2008,
neoliberal ideology – with its holy trinity of deregula-
tion, privatisation and free trade – seemed completely
discredited. As the US government initiated huge bail-
outs of big banks and financial institutions, granting
them a support that the working and middle classes
would never receive, public wrath turned immediately
against both the financial heroes of previous years
and the politicians bailing them out. Thomas Frank
described this as a ‘populist moment’, which was how-
ever missed by the new Obama administration, which
followed the bailout-course of its predecessor and
turned over economic policy to two friends of Wall
Street – Larry Summers and Tim Geithner.1
Lacking any independent and viable leftist forma-
tion (and with Occupy Wall Street still two years away),
the terrain was immediately occupied by the Tea Party,
which articulated and simultaneously redirected peo-
ple’s anger. What manifested itself in innumerable
rattlesnake-flags reading ‘Don’t Tread on Me’, was a
different kind of populism, whose target had shifted
from Wall Street to Washington: ‘an uprising against
government and taxes and federal directives’, and one
‘in favour of the very conditions that had allowed Wall
Street to loot the world’.2
1. T. Frank 2012, pp. 34, 39, 167–8.
2. T. Frank 2012, pp. 41–2.
2 • Introduction
How can we understand this shift from ‘Wall Street’ to ‘Washington’, from
a potentially progressive, anti-corporate populism, which swept Obama to the
White House, to a right-wing populism which, instead of taking up the issue of
the plight of those foreclosed, mobilised against the possibility that such ‘ losers’
might get government-support? The first wave of mass-events was indeed kicked
off by business-reporter Rick Santelli’s televised rant on 19 February 2009, where,
standing on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, he denounced the gov-
ernment’s attempt to go about ‘subsidising the losers’ mortgages’ with public
money. The subsequent rallies were organised by leading conservative institu-
tions. Without influential conservative organisations like Americans for Pros-
perity and Freedom Works, without the massive media-support by the Murdoch
empire and the Fox News network, and without the money by large corporations
such as the Koch brothers, the Tea Party movement would not have experienced
such a meteoric rise.3 Paul Krugman certainly had a point when he argued that
these were not manifestations of a grassroots-movement expressing a spontane-
ous outpouring of public sentiment, but rather a series of ‘AstroTurf (fake grass-
roots) events, manufactured by the usual suspects’.4
But this is less a satisfying answer than simply the beginning of a series of
new disquieting questions: how could a predominantly white, male, middle-class
mobilisation initiated and dominated by big money position itself as a move-
ment from the bottom up? How could it be perceived as ‘protest’ given that
it embodied an ‘ultraliberal-authoritarian radicalisation’ of a neoliberalism now
in crisis,5 which had reigned for over thirty years and was still in power? Why
did Santelli not immediately become the laughing stock of the country, when
he equated the stock-traders with ‘America’ and ‘We the People’? How can we
explain that the Tea Party, in spite of its open hatred of organised labour, gained
significant traction among blue-collar workers?
The Tea Party is, of course, not an isolated phenomenon, but rather part
of a series of neo-conservative uprisings, which in the US stretched from the
backlash following the Vietnam War through the culture-wars of the 1970s to
the Gingrich Revolution of 1994. The list is to be complemented by several suc-
cessful right-wing and neo-fascist movements in Europe. Most of them present
themselves as foes of the global and domestic elite and as representatives of
the people on history’s receiving end. If we had an X-ray for social conflicts,
W.F. Haug argued, the Republicans would become visible as reckless represen-
tatives of capitalism, who oppose any subtraction from the produced surplus-
value for social and reproductive purposes and only approve those expenses
3. Cf. Solty 2010a, p. 46.
4. Krugman 2009.
5. Solty 2011, p. 150.