Ideology

The concept of ideology is often associated with the work of Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) and Karl Marx (1818–1883). In general, Marxists approach cultural forms as emerging from specific historical situations that serve particular socioeconomic interests and that carry out important social functions. For Marx and Engels, the cultural ideas of an epoch serve the interests of the ruling class by providing ideologies that legitimate class domination. "Ideology" is a critical term used in Marxist analysis that describes how the dominant ideas of a ruling class promote the interests of that class and help mask oppression and injustices. Marx and Engels argued that during the feudal period, piety, honor, valor, and military chivalry were the ruling ideas of the reigning aristocratic classes. During the capitalist era, values of individualism, profit, competition, and the market became the dominant ideology of the new bourgeois class, which was then consolidating its class power. Because ideologies appear natural and common-sensical, they often are invisible and elude criticism.

Marx and Engels began their critique of ideology by attempting to show how ruling ideas reproduce dominant societal interests and relations and serve to naturalize, idealize, and legitimate the existing society, its institutions, and its values. In a competitive and atomistic capitalist society, it appears natural to assert that human beings are primarily self-interested and competitive, just as in a communist society; it seems natural to assert that people are cooperative by nature. In fact, human beings and societies are extremely complex and contradictory. Ideology smoothes over contradictions, conflicts, and negative features, idealizing human or social traits like individuality and competition, which are then elevated into governing concepts and values.

MARXIST APPROACHES TO CULTURE
AND IDEOLOGY

Many later Western Marxists developed these ideas, although they have tended to ascribe more autonomy and importance to culture than classical Marxism did. Within the Marxian tradition, a more positive concept of ideology, developed by Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924), sees socialist ideology as a positive force for developing revolutionary consciousness and promoting socialist development (Lenin, 1987). For the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), the ruling intellectual and cultural forces of an era constitute a form of hegemony, or domination by ideas and cultural forms that induce consent to the rule of the leading groups in a society. Gramsci argued that the unity of prevailing groups is usually created through the state—for instance, the American revolution or the unification of Italy in the nineteenth century. The institutions of "civil society" also play a role in establishing hegemony. Civil society, according to Gramsci, includes the church, school, media, and other forms of popular culture. Civil society mediates between the private sphere of personal economic interests and the family and the public authority of the state, serving as the locus of what Jurgen Habermas (b. 1929) described as "the public sphere."

Gramsci defined ideology as the ruling ideas that constitute the "social cement" unifying and holding together the established social order. While Marxist cultural critics like Gyögy Lukács (1885–1971) tended to see ideology as a manipulative force that helps ensure the rule of the dominant class, Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) instead stressed the utopian dimensions of Western culture and the ways in which cultural texts encode yearnings for a better world and a transformed society. Bloch's hermeneutic approach to Western culture in books like The Principle of Hope (1986) sought out visions of a better life in cultural artifacts ranging from the texts of Homer and the Bible to modern advertising and department store displays. Bloch's utopian impulse challenged film and cultural studies to articulate how culture provides alternatives to the existing world and how images, ideas, and narratives can promote individual emancipation and social transformation.

Bloch developed a type of cultural theory and ideology critique that is quite different from Marxist models that presents ideology critique as a tool for demolishing bourgeois culture and ideology—in effect, conflating bourgeois culture and ideology. This model—found in critiques by Lenin and most Marxist-Leninists—interprets dominant ideology primarily as a process created through mystification, error, and domination. This is contrasted to scientific or Marxist critical theory, in which ideology critique demonstrates the errors, mystifications, and ruling class interest within ideological artifacts, which are then smashed and discarded by the heavy hammer of the ideology critic.

Bloch, however, was more sophisticated than those who simply denounced all ideology as false consciousness or stressed the positive features of socialist ideology. Rather, Bloch sees emancipatory-utopian elements in all living ideologies, and deceptive and illusory qualities as well. For Bloch, ideology is "Janus-faced," or two-sided: it contains errors, mystifications, and techniques of manipulation and domination, but it also contains a utopian residue or surplus that can be used to critique society and to advance progressive politics. Bloch also perceived ideology at work in many phenomena usually neglected by Marxist and other ideology critiques: daydreams, popular literature, architecture, department store displays, sports, clothing, and other artifacts of everyday life. He believed that ideology critique should examine everyday life, as well as political texts and positions and the manifestly political ideologies of films, television, and other forms of mass-mediated culture.

Drawing on Bloch, Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), and other neo-Marxist theorists, Fredric Jameson (b. 1934) has suggested that mass cultural texts often have utopian moments. He has proposed that radical cultural criticism should analyze both the social hopes and fantasies in film as well as the ideological ways in which fantasies are presented, conflicts are resolved, and potentially disruptive hopes and anxieties are managed (Jameson, 1979, 1981). In his reading of Jaws (1975), for instance, Jameson notes that the shark stands in for a variety of fears—uncontrolled organic nature threatening the artificial society; big business corrupting and endangering community; disruptive sexuality threatening the disintegration of the family and traditional values—that the film tries to contain through the reassuring defeat of evil by representatives of the current class structure. Yet Jaws also contains utopian images of family, male bonding, and adventure, as well as socially critical visions of capitalism articulating fears that unrestrained big business would inexorably destroy the environment and community.

THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL

The term "Frankfurt School" refers to the work of members of the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research), which was established in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1923 as the first Marxist-oriented research center affiliated with a major German university (Kellner, 1989). The Frankfurt School coined the term "culture industry" in the 1930s to signify the industrialization of mass-produced culture and the commercial imperatives that constructs it (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1972). Its critical theorists analyzed mass-mediated cultural artifacts as products of industrial production, demonstrating that commodities of the culture industry exhibit the same features as other mass-produced objects: commodification, standardization, and massification. The culture industry has the specific function, however, of providing ideological legitimation of existing capitalist societies and of integrating individuals into its way of life.

The critiques of the culture industry developed in T. W. Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer's (1895–1973) famous Dialectic of Enlightenment (1972) contain many, albeit unsystematic, references to Hollywood film. Film in the culture industries has been organized like industrial production and uses standardized formulas and conventional production techniques to mass-produce films for purely commercial, rather than cultural, purposes. Films reproduce reality as it is and thus encourages individuals to adjust and conform to the new conditions of industrial and mass society:

They hammer into every brain the old lesson that continuous friction, the breaking down of all individual resistance, is the condition of life in this society. Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their thrashing so that the audience can learn to take their own punishment.
(Adorno and Horkheimer, 1972, p. 138)

The positions of Adorno, Horkheimer, and other members of the inner circle of the Institute for Social Research were contested by Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), an idiosyncratic theorist loosely affiliated with the Institute. Benjamin, writing in Paris during the 1930s, discerned progressive aspects in new technologies of cultural production such as photography, film, and radio. In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1934), Benjamin noted how new mass media were supplanting older forms of culture; mass reproduction of photography, film, recordings, and publications was replacing older emphasis on originality and "aura" in works of art. Benjamin believed that freed from the mystification of high culture, mass culture could create more critical individuals capable of judging and analyzing their culture, just as sports fans can dissect and evaluate athletic activities. In addition, Benjamin asserted that processing the rush of images of cinema helps viewers create subjectivities better able to parry the flux and turbulence of experience in industrialized, urbanized societies.

For Benjamin, the proliferation of mass art, especially through film, would bring images of the contemporary world to the masses and would help raise political consciousness by encouraging scrutiny of the world. Benjamin claimed that the mode of viewing film breaks with the reverential mode of aesthetic perception and awe encouraged by the bourgeois cultural elite, who promoted the religion of art. Montage and "shock effects" in film, mass spectatorship, discussion of issues that film viewing encourages, and other factors in the cinematic experience produce, in Benjamin's view, new social and political experiences of art that erode the private, solitary, and contemplative aesthetic experiences encouraged by high culture and its priests. Against the contemplation of high art, the "shock effects" of film produce a mode of "distraction" that Benjamin believed makes possible a "heightened presence of mind" and cultivation of "expert" audiences able to examine and criticize film and society (pp. 237–241).

Benjamin wished to promote a radical cultural and media politics able to create alternative oppositional cultures. Yet he recognized that media such as film could have conservative effects. While he believed that the loss of "aura," of magical force in mass-produced works is progressive and opens out cultural artifacts to increased critical and political discussion, Benjamin recognized that film could also create a new kind of ideological magic through the cult of celebrity and techniques like the close-up, which used film technologies to fetishize certain stars or images. Benjamin was thus one of the first radical cultural critics to look carefully at the form and technology of media culture while appraising its complex nature and effects.

POST-STRUCTURALISM AND THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION

Reacting against existential and Hegelian Marxism and the ultra-left political groups influenced by it, Louis Althusser (1918–1990) and a school of structural Marxists developed more "scientific forms" of Marxism and ideology while maintaining their commitment to revolutionary politics. A member of the French Communist Party, Althusser argued in For Marx (1970) that Marxism provided scientific perspectives on capitalism that made possible a revolutionary transition to socialism. In Reading Capital (1997), he maintained that Marx's scientific critique of capitalist political economy provided the foundations for a theory of society. Althusser's "structuralist Marxism" analyzed relations between the structures of the economy, state, ideology, and social institutions and their grounding in capitalist relations of production—"in the last instance" the determining force of all social life.

Althusser helped shift the discussion of "ideology" to focus on the everyday practices and rituals organized by social institutions that he termed "ideological state apparatuses" (schools, religion, the family, the media, and others). Their material practices, he argued, are parts of a closed system in which individuals are constantly "interpellated" into a social order, becoming unconsciously constituted as subjects by dominant social institutions and discourses. His most widely read essay, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," outlines his basic assumption that experience, consciousness, and subjectivity are themselves effects of an imaginary relationship between an individual and his/her real conditions of existence—a relationship that is constructed by the ideological state apparatuses, which reify social hierarchies and induces people to consent to systems of oppression.

Structuralists, like members of the Frankfurt School, were soon criticized for being too deterministic, for having an impoverished concept of subjectivity, and for missing the complexities and vicissitudes of history. A post-structuralist turn therefore found theorists like Roland Barthes (1915–1980) and the Tel Quel group in France turning toward history, politics, and active and creative human subjects, as well as developing a more complex model of textuality. The post-structuralist turn moved away from the more ahistorical, scientific, and objectivist modes of thought in structuralism. The post-structuralist moment was a particularly fertile one, with important theorists like Barthes, François Lyotard, and Michel Foucault writing groundbreaking works on culture and ideology, and younger theorists like Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and Paul Virilio entering into their productive periods.

In Mythologies (1972, 1957), Roland Barthes critically dissected a wide range of contemporary forms of culture, demonstrating his unique method of ideological interpretation and critique. According to Barthes, the mythology dissected in his essay "Operation Margarine," for example, embodies the fundamental rhetorical and ideological operations of French bourgeois culture. Margarine, in Barthes's account, is a highly artificial substance transfigured by advertising into a natural, beneficial, and acceptable substitution for butter. Analyzing ads that admit margarine's deficiencies and then trumpet its benefits, Barthes claims that such advertising techniques provide an "inoculation" against criticism of its imperfections. A similar operation, he claims, is typical in discourses on topics like the military, church, and capitalism, in which their limitations are mentioned in order to highlight their necessity and importance for the social order.

Likewise, mythologies obscure history, transforming contingent factors into natural essences, as if it were natural that an African soldier salute the French flag, in Barthes's famous example of a photograph that erases all of the evils of French colonization in an idealized image. Constructing an argument that anticipates postmodern emphasis on difference and otherness, Barthes points out how myths erase what is different and dissimilar, assimilating otherness to nature, as when the image of the French soldier folds the African into the French empire, or margarine ads assimilate an artificial substance into the order of culinary appropriateness. Barthes's method of analyzing rhetorical strategies of media culture and taking apart the mythologies that colonize social life help to produce a critical consciousness in his reader.

Sophisticated new theoretical approaches to the production of the works of film and its production of ideology began emerging in the 1960s, including those analyses published in Cahiers du cinema and the extremely influential British journal Screen, which translated many key Cahiers texts and other works of French film theory, including those of Roland Barthes and Christian Metz. These generated much more sophisticated formal approaches to film (Metz, 1974; Heath, 1981). The Cahiers group moved from seeing film as the product of creative auteurs, or authors (their politique du auteurs of the 1950s), to focusing on the ideological and political content of film and how film transcoded dominant ideologies. At the same time, French film theory and Screen focused on the specific cinematic mechanisms that helped produce meaning. These theorists and others analyzed how ideology permeated cinematic form and content, images and narrative, symbols and spectacle (Nichols, 1981; Kellner and Ryan, 1988).

Post-structuralism stressed the text's openness and heterogeneity, its embedded in history and desire, its political and ideological dimensions, and its excess of meaning. The conjunction of post-structuralism in the academic world and new social movements stressing the importance of race, gender, sexuality, and other markers of group identity led to expansion of the concept of ideology to many new dimensions and thematics. British cultural studies, for instance, adopted a feminist perspective, paid greater attention to race, ethnicity, and nationality, and sexuality in response to social struggles and movements (Kellner, 1995).

Earlier Marxist concepts of ideology presupposed a homogenous ruling class that unambiguously and without contradiction articulates its class interests through a monolithic ideology. Since its class interests were thought to be predominantly economic, ideology in this model referred primarily to ideas that legitimated the class rule of capitalists. Ideology was thus viewed as that set of ideas that promoted the capitalist class's economic interests. During the 1960s and 1970s, however, this model has been contested by theorists who have argued that an orthodox Marxist concept of ideology is reductionist because it equates ideology solely with those ideas that serve class or economic interests, leaving out such variable and significant factors as sex and race. Reducing ideology to class interests makes it appear that the only significant domination in society is one of class or economic domination, whereas many theorists argue that sex and race oppression are fundamentally important and indeed intertwined in fundamental ways with class and economic domination.

READING RAMBO IDEOLOGICALLY

Thus many critics have proposed that ideology be extended to cover theories, ideas, texts, narratives, and images that legitimate domination of women and people of color by white men and that thus serve the interests of ruling powers. Such ideology critique criticizes sexist and racist ideology as well as bourgeois-capitalist class ideology. To carry out an ideology critique of Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), for instance, it wouldn't be enough simply to attack its militarist or imperialist ideology and the ways that the militarism and imperialism of the film serve capitalist interests by legitimating intervention in Southeast Asia (Kellner, 1995). To carry out a full ideology critique, one would also have to examine the film's sexism and racism, showing how representations of women, gender, the Vietnamese, the Russians, and so on are a fundamental part of the ideological text of Rambo.

In regard to gender, for instance, one might note that Rambo instantiates a masculinist image of gender that defines masculinity in terms of the male warrior with the features of great strength, effective use of force, and military heroism as the highest expression of life. Symptomatically, the woman characters in the film are either whores, or, in the case of a Vietnamese contra, a handmaiden to Rambo's exploits who functions primarily as a seductive force, seducing Vietnamese guards (a figure also central to the image of woman in The Green Berets, 1968), or a destructive one, when she becomes a woman warrior, a female version of Rambo. Significantly, the only moment of eroticism in Rambo(brief and chaste) comes when Rambo and his woman agent kiss after great warrior feats. Seconds after the kiss, the woman herself is shot and killed—the moral being that the male warrior must go it alone and must thus renounce women and sexuality. This theme obviously fits into the militarist and masculinist theme of the film as well as the representation of ascetic male heroes who must rise above sexual temptation in order to become maximally effective saviors or warriors.

The representations and thematics of race also contribute fundamentally to the militarist theme. The Vietnamese and Russians are presented as alien Others, as embodiments of Evil, in a typically Hollywood manichean scenario that presents the Other, the Enemy, "Them," as evil and "Us," the good guys, as virtuous, heroic, good, and innocent. Rambo appropriates stereotypes of the evil Japanese and Germans from World War II movies in its representations of the Vietnamese and the Russians, thus continuing the manichean Hollywood tradition of substituting past icons of evil for contemporary villains. The Vietnamese are portrayed as duplicitous bandits, ineffectual dupes of the evil Soviets, and cannon fodder for Rambo's exploits, while the Soviets are presented as sadistic torturers and inhuman, mechanistic bureaucrats.

The stereotypes of race and gender in Rambo are so exaggerated, so crude, that they point to the artificial and socially constructed nature of all ideals of masculinity, femininity, race, and ethnicity. Thus, expanding the concept of ideology to include race and sex helps provide a multidimensional ideology critique, which expands radical cultural criticism while enriching the project of ideology critique.

Ideologies should be analyzed within the context of social struggle and political debate rather than simply as purveyors of false consciousness whose falsity is exposed and denounced by ideology critique. A diagnostic ideology critique looks behind the façade of ideology to see the social and historical forces and struggles that require it and to examine the cinematic apparatus and strategies that make ideologies attractive. Such a model of ideology criticism is not solely denunciatory; it also looks for socially critical and oppositional moments within all ideological texts, including conservative ones. As feminists and others have argued, one should learn to read texts "against the grain," yielding progressive insights even from reactionary texts.

SEE ALSO Marxism;Propaganda

FURTHER READING

Adorno, T. W., and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Seabury, 1972.

Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. London: New Left Books, 1971.

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies, edited and translated by Annette Levers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.

Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968, 217–251. The original essay was published in 1934.

Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986.

Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971.

Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Boston and London: Blackwell, 1992.

Heath, Stephen, Questions of Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981.

Jameson, Fredric. "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture." Social Text 1 (Winter 1979): 130–148.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich. The Essential Lenin. New York: Dover, 1987.

Kellner, Douglas. Critical Theory, Marxism, and Modernity. Cambridge, UK, and Baltimore, MD: Polity Press and John Hopkins University Press, 1989.

——. Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity, and Politics between the Modern and the Postmodern. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.

——, and Michael Ryan. Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

Metz, Christian, Language and Cinema. The Hague: Mouton, 1974.

Nichols, Bill. Ideology and the Image: Social Representations in the Cinema and Other Media. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981.

Douglas Kellner