Griffin - Ideology and Culture

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Journal of Political Ideologies
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Ideology and culture
Roger Griffina a Department of History, Oxford Brookes University,
To cite this Article Griffin, Roger(2006) 'Ideology and culture', Journal of Political Ideologies, 11: 1, 77 99 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/13569310500395974 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569310500395974
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Journal of Political Ideologies (February 2006), 11(1), 7799
Ideology and culture

ROGER GRIFFIN
Department of History, Oxford Brookes University
Downloaded By: [SOAS Library] At: 11:29 29 April 2011
ABSTRACT Finding a pragmatic exit from the semantic labyrinth surrounding ideology and culture, this article considers the neutral connotations of ideology as a formative, intrinsically paradoxical, constituent of culture, and argues that the heterogeneous, volatile, and contested nature of all ideologies when viewed through some postmodernist lenses is their hallmark only under the historically exceptional societal conditions of high modernity. It moves on to consider the virtues of several non-reductionist variants of Marxist theory that postulate a subtle dialectic between ideologys coercive and emancipatory functions, aspects that can be seen at work at the generative and experiential core of all human cultures, and not just capitalist ones. These reections lead to a call for a dialectical, anthropologically informed approach to the interface between culture and ideology. It concludes on a speculative note by suggesting that analogies made between ideological self-replication in cultural processes and the genetic basis of evolution could be more than metaphorical should the infant science of memetics prove to have an empirically sound base.
Without contraries is no progression. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Dening ideology and culture (or Snark-hunting for beginners) When Raymond Williams observed in his Keywords that Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language he omitted to enlighten his reader as to what other(s) he had in mind, but ideology would certainly have tted the bill.1 One obvious property that the two terms under examination in this article share is their unusually polysemic nature, one which makes the
Correspondence Address: Roger Grifn, Department of History, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, OX3 0BP, UK. ISSN 1356-9317 print; ISSN 1469-9613 online/06/01007799 q 2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13569310500395974
roger grifn lexicographers task less like pinning down their established varieties of meaning in an entomologists display case, than ailing around to catch some of them in a buttery net while they swarm round his head. In their pioneering taxonomic investigation of the term culture carried out in the early 1950s, A. Kroeber and C. Kluckhohn identied 164 species of meaning (many of them closely related, of course) inhabiting the anthropological and sociological literature of the day.2 Three decades later Malcolm Hamilton attempted to combat the conceptual anarchy surrounding ideology, a term he considered too often used in an excessively value-laden manner such that propositions that ought to be established empirically are implied or prejudged by the denition of the phenomenon under investigation3a remark entirely applicable to culture as well. To carry out this cull of redundant meanings he combed through 85 academic sources and was able to identify 27 recurrent denitional components. These he then whittled down to size by deliberately (though somewhat arbitrarily) eliminating Marxist, totalizing, and psychodynamic connotations to produce a highly condensed synthetic denition. Were such expeditions into the dense semantic thicket that has grown up around both terms to be repeated now, they would doubtless be confronted by an even greater biodiversity from which to harvest their samples. Further reection on the task this article has undertaken of providing a rough guide to how the two terms relate soon reveals an added dimension of difculty in comparison with analyses of other multivalent social scientic concepts (e.g. revolution, society): the very act of embarking on it poses an acute form of the cognitive dilemma for which Douglas Hofstadter coined the term strange del, Escher, Bach.4 Just as any loop in his Pulitzer Prize winning Go conceptualization of ideology, however seemingly objective the academic register and impeccable the scholarly apparatus employed, is inevitably conditioned by the authors own ideology, so any analysis of culture is shaped by largely subliminal culture-specic and culturally conditioned processes. In both cases personal and supra-personal processes of cognition, construction, and imagining5 are involved into which even the most methodologically self-aware researcher can have but limited introspection. As a result, only the more conceptually challenged academic would venture into this highly contested problematic without a healthy respect for its intrinsic complexity. A few hours spent disentangling the main strands of connotations they have acquired in secondary literature is liable to induce that sense of intellectual cul-de-sac and bewilderment that Socratic philosophy termed aporia (literally no way out), but that in the postmodern context does not necessarily serve as the prelude to illumination that Greek philosophy envisaged. Despite such forebodings, the advice which Chris Barker offers in his inuential Cultural Studies: Its Theory and Practice suggests a refreshingly down-to-earth approach to negotiating, or rather forcibly breaking out, of the semantic maze that surrounds these terms when approached simply as objects of contemplation. He advocates a stance that allows us to confront such elusive concepts without being overawed by a sense of the innite regression of a denitive meaning 78
ideology and culture reminiscent of the futile chase depicted in Lewis Carrolls poem The Hunting of the Snark:6
There is no one single, correct denition of culture: Culture is not out there waiting to be correctly described by theorists who keep getting it wrong. Rather, the concept of culture is a tool which is of more or less usefulness to us as a life form. Consequently, its usage and meanings continue to change as thinkers have hoped to do different things with it. We should ask not what culture is, but how the language of culture is used and for what purposes.7
Hamilton offers an observation in the course of dening ideology that can be construed in a similarly common sense spirit: How one categorizes reality depends on ones purposes, the questions one asks about it, and often prior dispositions and commitments to particular explanations of it.8 Such pragmatism in approaching thorny denitional problems (which is reminiscent of Albert Einsteins concept of the operational denition in physics) makes it possible to provide a succinct yet objective account of the relationship between ideology and culture to be translated into a less daunting, more modest, and hopefully more useful undertaking. This is to identify, within the specic context of a multidisciplinary symposium on ideologys relationship with neighbouring concepts, some of the particular meanings that ideology acquires as a heuristic device when associated with the investigation of culture. Or in Bourdieuian terms, to ask what special connotations ideology has come to assume within the increasingly powerful eld of cultural production that has formed around the concept of culture itself within the Western (in this case Anglophone) human sciences.9 Accordingly, this article will focus rst on the way the terms converge in their positive, or at least neutral, sense as a denitional property of human society and its evolution, and then how they also have come to be used almost synonymously in some areas of political theory as exclusively negative terms to describe the coercive, legitimizing function of thought in a state system based on alienation and oppression. This will clear the way for the positive and negative connotations to be transcended, at least in principle, dialectically in a synthesis that emphasizes both the constraining and emancipating potential of cultural production and of the ideology (and perhaps even the physiology) that underpins it. A working denition of ideology in the context of culture The basis of the convergence between the pair of terms under examination is that they both embrace non-material aspects of human existence relating to the subjective realm of ideas, values, world-views, and cosmologies, the very stuff of human history. Just how closely the two terms can seem symbiotically aligned is evident from the syncretic denition of culture offered by Kloeber and Kluckhohn on the basis of their exhaustive investigation into how social scientists actually had been using it between the early 1930s and the late 1940s. The allusion to a cultural essence betrays the fact that their research was carried out in blissful ignorance 79
roger grifn of the post-structural and post-modern paradigms that would later emphasize the non-essential, constructed nature of both culture and all academic interpretations of it. Nonetheless, their proposed syncretic denition in some senses adumbrates even these later developments:
Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behaviour acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artefacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e. historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; cultural systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other as conditioning elements of further action.10
The assumption that traditional ideas and attached values lie at the core of culture summons up the term ideology, as does the notion that cultural systems are conditioned by past action and condition future action (as long as it is accepted that action in this context is always ideologically motivated or rationalized). Similarly, the rst part of the synthetic denition that Hamilton managed to distil from the alembic of his lexicographical experiment with ideology is that it is a system of collectively held normative and reputedly factual ideas and beliefs and attitudes advocating a particular pattern of social relations and arrangements, which surely goes for culture too.11 An initial objection might be that such an approach connes ideology to a verbal realm that precludes considering its wider semiotic, ritual, artistic, technological, and material expression in external reality, and which by default become the exclusive domain of culture. However, one expert in this area, Raymond Geuss, stresses that ideology too contains both discursive elements such as concepts, ideas, beliefs, and non-discursive elements, namely characteristic gestures, rituals, attitudes, forms of artistic activity, etc..12 As such ideology, at least in what he terms this purely descriptive sense, refers simply to one of the parts into which the socio-cultural system of a human group can be divided for convenient study, so that ideology is treated as a universal aspect of human society to be taken into account in the empirical study of human groups, which can also be called anthropology.13 By following through the logic of this universalizing anthropological approach to ideology it becomes possible to see it as a latent aspect of all human cultural activity and its material products, though one which only becomes apparent when a particular heuristic perspective is applied to it, rather in the way light behaves with the properties either of a wave or of a beam according to the experiment in particle physics to which it is submitted. Phenomenologically human existence is lived out and experienced non-ideologically, but once externalized in semiotic or material culture it immediately assumes an ideological dimension when any of its products are considered from an outsider perspective in terms of their function in maintaining or challenging the social, economic, or political status quo. At an individual level ideology is thus an integral part of the instinctive human drive to plan, rationalize, and legitimise action or behaviour, whether as a self-aware protagonist of major historical transformations or as the 80
ideology and culture un-self-conscious actor in the intimate daily drama of perpetuating a familiar domestic routine. This construct is entirely compatible with the phrase completing Hamiltons one-sentence denition of ideology cited earlier, which species that it is aimed at justifying a particular pattern of conduct, which its proponents seek to promote, realize, pursue, or maintain. Once this stress on the role played by deliberate aims (whether conservative or revolutionary, cynical or idealistic) as a constituent of ideology is replaced by the idea of its conscious or unconscious function, then the craggy contours of an ideal type of ideology as a cultural construct, one which gives it an elective afnity with culture, start to loom out of the fog on the following lines:
Ideology is a relatively cohesive, dynamically evolving, set of collectively held ideas or beliefs, whether expressed verbally or in some other semiotic, performative, ritual, artistic, or behavioural form, when considered in their function either of reinforcing, or of challenging, existing social, political, economic, aesthetic, technological praxis in a particular society and the dominant values and cosmology that sustain it. Ideologys main socio-psychological function on an individual level is thus the normative one of endowing human beings with a sense of identity, purpose, and reality, and of enabling them to be convinced of the self-evident justication and normality of their actions, despite considerations apparent to external observers that may show these to be illusory, subjective, or generated by psychological drives, material interests, or supra-individual (historical) factors. As such ideology is an integral and constitutive aspect of all human culture, and is endowed with the paradoxical quality of being, according to specic contexts, either replicatory and coercive, or innovative and emancipatory. It hence plays a primary role both in social conditioning, acculturation, and the perpetuation of the past through tradition, and in the generation and implementation of revolutionary, future-oriented projects for the creation of radically new situations.
The deeper implications of the last part of this denition should become clearer in due course. The main thrust of the rst part is that all human culture has an ideological dimension, but only when considered under the aspect of ideology, in much the same way as everything is political, and (pace Margaret Thatcher) everything is social when considered from the perspective of politics or sociology. It follows from this that social activities (playing football, teaching yoga, making pasta) and cultural artefacts (toys, love songs, Renaissance paintings) can all be treated as having an ideological dimension without being reduced essentialistically to their function of deceiving, mystifying, and manipulating reality to the benet of unseen interested parties or institutional forces. Even the pronouncements of totalitarian leaders can be treated as reecting genuine beliefs, and having an ideological, culture-constitutive dimension without denying that their ideas, once expressed in speeches, directives, and newspaper articles serve the purposes of cynical propaganda and mass-manipulation. Culture after the cultural turn Approached as an ever present, immanent aspect of all human culture, ideology thus partakes of its paradoxical, Janus-headed qualities by manifesting itself both 81
roger grifn individually and collectively, and by being experienced as real and natural when lived out existentially and subjectively, but constructed and articial in interpretations of it carried out by historians and social scientists. The latter, however much recourse they make to methodological empathy, necessarily adopt the objectifying standpoint of an outsider to the experience itself.14 Both culture and ideology are thus simultaneously authentic and inauthentic, solidly concrete and diaphanously insubstantial. As one political scientist put it:
Things that appear to be most natural to human societymarket economies, the state, the nation, society itselfare historical constructions made by human actors who in turn are reconstituted by the very products of their making.15
The signicance of this assertion assumes its full weight in the context of the argument being developed here when it is realized that it was made by Ronald Grigor Suny, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, who specializes in the politics of national and ethnic identity within the context of the Soviet Empire and the aftermath of its collapse. The essay from which it is taken pays eloquent tribute to the way the cultural turn in the social sciences provides heuristic strategies for understanding events generated by nationalism markedly superior to those delivered by conventional materialistic Marxism, by historiography that clings to essentialist or objectivist fallacies about reality, or by rational choice theory. Sunys article is also a thinly veiled indictment of contemporary political science (at least in the US) which he maintains has hardly been touched by the cultural turn, and hence remains largely impervious to its inuence, barred from accessing the profound insights that it affords into the dynamics of political processes and institutions. As a result there is at present among political scientists no consensus on whether culture is just a piece of information to be considered or an independent explanatory variable.16 Suny traces the cultural turn in the social sciences to the combined impact of several major gures, such as E. P. Thompson, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault, as well as to the wider inuence of the intellectual climate of poststructuralism and postmodernism, and the parallel linguistic and historical turns occurring in neighbouring disciplines. He suggests its basic insight is epitomized in a statement made by Clifford Geertz: Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of signicance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of laws, but an interpretive one in search of meaning.17 Under the inuence of this type of anthropological, semiotic, and ontological conception of culture, Suny argues that Culturalists deeply suspect hard, xed, essential social categories (class, nation, gender), and propose considering a more radical understanding of identities as uid, fragmented, and constantly in need of hard work to sustain.18 The profound implications of this premise for the understanding of ideology by political scientists can be inferred from the stress he proceeds to place on the way the cultural turn underlines the importance of realizing that the primary function of language is no longer merely expressive of reality but constitutive of it: 82
ideology and culture

Culturalists contend that a large part of politics is the struggle over meaning and the right to be authorized to speak. For culturalists language not only expresses but constitutes the political world. Derived from neither social position nor ideology, language itself helps to shape perception of position, interests, ideologies, and the meanings attached to the social and political world. Interests and identities, even what might constitute strategic choices, are themselves part of a political process of constructing meanings.19
Ideology can thus be seen from this perspective as both cultural product and producer, as cultural construct and as a constitutive element in the formation of culture, a phenomenon whose salient property in the human context is that it constantly reproduces itself without ever perfectly replicating itself. It is precisely thanks to this imperfect copying process that human culture is able to adapt, innovate, and develop in a way that mirrors the genetic processes at the heart of an evolutionary process based on natural selection.20 Ideologys relationship to culture thus poses yet another example of the chicken and egg conundrum that constantly confronts contemporary life and human scientists in their quest to understand the genesis, evolutionary, and self-duplicating processes that make both biological evolution and societal change possible. As a result, non-fundamentalist dialects of the cultural turn can encourage a dynamic concept of historical and political realities and the ideologies that articulate and shape them as a process of constant ux and morphological adaptation.21 This not only subverts any master narratives used to describe them, but precludes (closes off) the possibility of explanatory closure. Suny cites approvingly the pronouncement of two ethnographically trained culturalists that, culture is not an object to be described, neither is it a unied corpus of symbols and meanings that can be denitively interpreted. Culture is contested, temporal, and emergent.22 Modernity as the break-down of a totalizing culture However, before political scientists heads are turned by the cultural turn, they should be on their guard against the tendency it encourages to characterize culture as if the social realities that constitute it are like endlessly perambulating dunes and treacherous quicksands, for ever generating ideological tensions that deny nal resolution. It may well be that the stress this approach places on cultures dynamic polymorphism is itself culturally over-determined. William Sewell, for example, in his attempt to move beyond the cultural turn, claims that all cultures are contradictory, [. . .] loosely integrated, [. . .] contested, [. . .] subject to constant change [. . . and] weakly bounded.23 In response Patrick Brantlinger introduces an important caveat when he points out that while this is certainly the case with both modern and now postmodern cultures, [. . .] Sewell draws no line between primitive and civilized cultures.24 What Brantlinger is alluding here to is the impressive evidence accumulated by comparative cultural anthropology over the last two centuries suggesting that our Blue Planet was once home to innumerable social systems as heterogeneous as 83
roger grifn human languages, at least until they were transformed or eradicated by exposure to the increasingly globalizing forces of modernity in their various permutations (European colonial, Western, American, capitalist, Soviet or Chinese communist, Japanese imperial, etc.). What these traditional or pre-modern societies had in common was that all aspects of human life within them were bound together by a traditional and communal (though often richly variegated and never entirely static) metaphysical cosmology (religion) and corresponding ritual. Both of these were in turn inextricably integral to social praxis, namely the transmittable and evolving technologies of economic, material, and spiritual (psychological) survival which underpinned the cohesion and sustainability of the social system. In these tradition-based worlds, what Marx called in the opening pages of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon the poetry of the future which fuels projects of radical social transformation and emancipation from tradition was literally inconceivable. This is not to imply that premodern societies were static. Several classical civilizations underwent sustained periods of seismic transformation in their cosmology and technology, notably in what has come to be known (after Karl Jaspers concept of the Achsenzeit) the Axial Age around 500 BC. Yet in every case a new, relatively homogeneous social system and cosmological tradition eventually emerged to replace the former one, avoiding the fate of ideological fragmentation and hypertrophy, radical secularization, and perpetuated liminality that characterizes the modern West.25 In his concept of the megamachine, rst expounded in his Technics and Civilization (1934), Lewis Mumford offered a powerful metaphor for the ability of social systems underpinned by elaborate cosmologies to exercise a totalizing sway over society, making possible the vast achievements of cultural production and collective organization that characterize the major civilizations of European, Middle Eastern, Asian and Central American antiquity. However, if Egyptian, Aztec, or even Western Medieval civilizations are contrasted with High Renaissance society, it is tempting to see Western modernity in terms of the accelerating breakdown and dysfunction of the megamachine of Catholic Christianity and of the relative cultural homogeneity that accompanied it. It was this unique metamorphosis in human culture that led Mumford after 1945 to focus his attention on the need for another transformation of man if long-term disaster was to be avoid.26 One play that dramatizes a symbolically important moment in that protracted process of fragmentation is Bertolt Brechts Life of Galileo (1938). In it the Church is portrayed as threatening the scientist with torture in order to delay the growing schism between Faith and Reason driven by the progress of empirically based astronomy. Brecht thereby intended to expose both the profound ideological dimension latent not just in institutional religion, but in the natural sciences and in the cosmology that underpins both of them, as well as the ideological implications of pure science for perpetuating the mystication of prevailing power relations. An extended essay in intellectual history that chimes in with this perspective is the one on The Decay of Values that Hermann Broch interpolates into his novel The Sleepwalkers (1932). An anatomical study of the deepening spiritual crisis of 84
ideology and culture the European society, the trilogy traces the breakdown of the relative homogeneity and integrity of Europe as long as it was dominated in the West by the relative cohesive theology of Catholic Christian theology. It describes the Renaissance as that criminal and rebellious age. [. . .] in which the Christian scheme of values was broken in two halves [. . .] that age in which with the falling asunder of the medieval organon, a process of dissolution destined to go on for ve centuries was inaugurated and the seeds of the modern world planted.27 Broch thus equates the rise of secular modernity with a process of fragmentation (de-centring, deracination, disembedding) which leads to a proliferation of competing logics. These offer a temporary but inherently unstable and ultimately soul destroying refuge for modern human beings, each one of which is helplessly caught in the mechanism of autonomous value-systems, forced, no matter how romantically and sentimentally he [sic] may yearn to return to the fold of faith, to become a specialist, eaten up by the radical logic of the value into whose jaws he has fallen.28 The logical endpoint of this process is the radically disenchanted experience of the world (which in turn spawns myriad projects for its re-enchantment) that Max Weber had articulated some three decades before Brochs novel when he wrote that culture can be regarded as a nite segment of the meaningless innity of the world process, a segment on which human beings confer meaning.29 Once a society, already shaped or misshapen by the value-eroding and ideologyproliferating impact of modernity then enters an objective (socio-economic/political) crisis of the sort that occurred in the nal years of the Weimar Republic, millions of ordinary people can collectively enter the disorienting world of ideological ux and mirages that Sewell equates with culture tout court. At that point it may, as the meteoric rise of Hitler illustrates, unleash their instinctive mythopoeic drive to impose meaning on the void that is opening up, turning society into an incubator for totalizing visions of renewal, and for apocalyptic fantasies of participating in the foundation of a new historical era. The concern with culture as a symptom of cultural crisis Such ideological tornados are, however, still the exception rather than the rule even in modernity. Once we focus on the atypicality, at least as far as the longue e of human history is concerned, of our increasingly globalized Western dure modernity with respect to premodern (traditional, primitive) societies, a fresh perspective emerges on the relationship between ideology and culture. Outside the periods of transition that characterized the axial age of the major civilizations of the past, it seems clear that cultural production was channelled largely into duplicating the past patterns of society and the cosmology that underpinned them. This did not preclude ideological conicts or even major schisms within the dominant world-view, but meant that continuity and tradition still tended to prevail over alternative, revolutionary (e.g. millenaristic) schemes of history that envisaged linear progress, radical change, or the imminent realization of utopian new eras. This held true even if seismic upheavals in the histories of individual 85
roger grifn civilizations or peoples enabled a rival cultural system to be installed as the ofcial world view, as when the Roman Empire adopted Christianity or the Turks adopted Islam. In contrast, modernity has brought about the chronic cultural instability captured in Walter Benjamins image of the Storm of Progress, the hallmark of which is that crisis has become a permanent status quo (thereby transforming the original meaning of the term crisis). This in turn has proliferated new ways of seeing and acting on the world with a view to bringing about its transformation, the aggregate effect of which has been to generate the welter of competing value systems, logics, and totalizing interpretations of reality collectively known under the heading of aesthetic and political modernism.30 In this way modernity has become the age of ideology, an era of overtly conicting cosmologies and the conspicuous profusion of alternative perceptions of reality. These make transparent (at least to political scientists in the role of professional outsiders) for all to see the constructed, and would-be constituent, dimension of ideology that tends to remain occulted in the social system of a primitive society. Clearly, the interpretive schema sketched here bears the hallmarks of just the type of master narrative that has become so anachronistic and taboo since the cultural turn. Yet if it can be tentatively accepted at least as a heuristic model, then it makes sense to approach the emergence of so many powerful political ideologies in 19th century Europe, such as German nationalism,31 and their tendency to develop in stressed historical conditions into fully edged political religions,32 as the products of an ingrained societal need already alluded to, namely to generate countervailing forces to combat the progressive disenchantment of the world. As an atomized, personalized phenomenon this need may have become a dening trait of modern and postmodern culture, but not of human culture per se. It also becomes plausible to suggest that the sustained forensic concern with ideology manifested in The Journal of Political Ideologies, and in the original Centre for Political Ideologies symposium that was the starting point for this essay, is at some deep structural level symptomatic of the ongoing, irresolvable ideological crisis that characterizes modernity, and that is manifested in the endless profusion of alternative constructions of realityi.e. ideologiesthat in their more overtly tre. In a parallel way the modern Wests political aspect are CPIs raison de obsessive preoccupation with cultural history is symptomatic of its freefall into the irresolvable crisis evoked by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy which has produced a culture unsatised by everything it devours, which transforms the most powerful, wholesome nourishment into history and criticism,33 leaving its inhabitants starved of metaphysical nourishment. Ideology as cultural hegemony Rather than pursue a line of inquiry that ultimately calls into question the nutritional value of a culture in which some intellectuals nd it meaningful to write articles on culture, it is perhaps best to backtrack, and to focus on ideology and culture as divergent rather than convergent concepts. Their tendency to pull in 86
ideology and culture different directions is reected in their etymology. Whereas the relatively recent neologism ideology was born of Destutt de Tracys liberal project of applying the Enlightenment tradition of analysis to the scientic study and demystication of ideas and systems of thought, culture boasts a much more illustrious etymological heritage which lends it connotations of healthy organic growth and grandiose civilizing achievement.34 As a result the positive aura that ideology can acquire when associated with culture as a force for distinctively human realms of achievement can easily give way to a negative one closer to the demystifying thrust of its etymology. Thus, Raymond Geuss contrasts the descriptive uses of the term ideology with the distinctly pejorative meaning it acquires when used to refer to a form of consciousness which is delusional, or false, or rationalizes the illegitimate domination of one class over another.35 The Marxist tradition of the social sciences is dominated by this negative use, a canonical example of which is found in Engels letter to Mehring of 1893 where he states:
Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him; otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all. Hence he imagines false or apparent motives. Because it is a process of thought, he derives both its form and its content from pure thought, either his own or that of his predecessors.
Engels proceeds to see the sphere of historical ideology that determines the contents of false consciousness as comprising the political, juridical, philosophical, theologicalin short, all the spheres belonging to society and not only to nature.36 The application of this premise to modern society under the domination of capitalism quickly leads to the culture and ideology merging as synonyms for the conscious or unconscious manipulation of reality to the benet of a tiny minority. Indeed, in the more economically determinist interpretations of the materialistic conception of history culture is relegated to being part of the superstructure, and hence a mere epiphenomenon of the socio-economic base. However, a number of major Marxist thinkers have attributed far greater autonomy and importance to culture as a principal locus for the revolutionary struggle, notably Raymond Williams, whose concern with revising the relegation of culture within traditional Marxism,37 as we noted earlier, exerted appreciable inuence on the cultural turn. In this enterprise he had been anticipated by some of the later essays of none other than Lenin himself.38 However, as is known well beyond Marxist circles, the pioneer of this antireductionist approach to culture was Antonio Gramsci, who made a decisive break with classical Marxism by conceptualizing the power of the capitalist system in its various (liberal, Bonapartist, Fascist) permutations as being dependent on a blend of dominion (which involves a state apparatus of social control and coercion) and cultural hegemony. Though he was never in a position to resolve the ambiguities in his use of this term before his untimely death,39 it is clear from his prison writings that he saw the need to counteract the cultural hegemony of capitalism at the level of ideas and valueshe did not apply ideology to the Marxist struggle 87
roger grifn since it clearly retained its connotations of false consciousness and manipulationif the socialist struggle to transcend the capitalist phase of historical development was to be successful. This was especially true in advanced democracies particularly where state power rested as much on a political culture impregnated with liberal, capitalist, and nationalist ideology (i.e. cultural hegemony), rather than on feudal power relations of despotic force and subjugation (dominion).40 In short, from a Gramscian perspective modern political revolutions always involve more than the deployment of violence against the established order: violence is never naked, but clothed in ideologies and values that made the transformation conceivable in the rst place. Gramsci would surely have warmed to John Adams observation on the American Revolutionary War against British colonial rule: The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations. This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American gime in the French Revolution.41 Similarly, the rapid overthrow of the ancien re Revolution would have been impossible without the notably un-coordinated and un-concerted counter-hegemonic struggle of the philosophes at the level of intellectual (and not even primarily political) culture, many of whom were antidemocratic thinkers. Even in Russia, where the traditions of feudal despotism were still strong, the foundations of the Russian Revolution were laid in the diffuse subculture of counter-hegemonic political ideas constituted by the intelligentsia rather than in terrorist training camps. The specularity/spectrality of capitalisms cultural hegemony In the post-war period Louis Althusser built on Gramscis conceptual framework by associating the perpetuation of capitalism with the dominance of what he termed the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA) as opposed to the Repressive State Apparatus (RSA), at which point ideology and culture have come once again to resemble the inseparable twins familiar from non-Marxist culturalist discourse. The difference is that they are now endowed with the malevolent power to substitute the overt deployment of coercive state power with a covert normalization which, in Althussers analysis, operates at a profound ontological level to ensure the collusion of the exploited in their own exploitation. Inuenced by Lacans blend of Hegel and Freud in his structuralist analysis of how human beings acquire consciousness, he saw a profound nexus between ideology and all human behaviour (i.e. culture in the totalizing sense): There is no practice except by and in an ideology.42 Applied to the Marxist analysis of modern capitalism, this premise leads to the insight that it reproduces itself not through a crude process of dominion and brainwashing imposed from above, but by a circular process in which the objective external world (i.e. of capitalist society)presented and experienced as the ultimate reality or what Althusser calls the Absolute Subjectis shaped by ideas and values carried in the individuals subjective inner world (constituted as subject). These ideas being in 88
ideology and culture turn are conditioned by the prevailing material reality, while simultaneously underpinning it. The structure of all ideology produced by the States Ideological State Apparatus is thus what he terms speculary, in that it has a mirror-structure. Once experienced as normal, substantial, and real, a given socio-political order functions as a total culture, and thus occupies the mythic Centre from which it calls into being (interpellates) members of society in a double mirrorconnexion. At this point, in Althussers cryptic formulation, it subjects the subjects to the Subject, while reciprocally the Subject provides them with a deep sense of existential security and identity.43 At that point exploitation and alienation have become the ontological home that the members of capitalist society carry on their backs like snails. Ideology and culture have fused and become coterminal. It is precisely this speculary quality of culture under a capitalist society that endows the Ideological State Apparatus with such extraordinary mystifying power. Despite the considerable sophistication with which Althusser re-imagines ideology in comparison with the more reductionist versions of the base/ superstructure dualism encountered in classic Marxism, he arguably operates with a perspective on culture just as foreshortened and ethnocentric as that of many non-Marxist culturalists. For example, his primary concern with offering a radical critique of contemporary capitalist modernity leads him to reduce the church and school under capitalism to manifestations of Ideological State Mechanisms.44 Yet his own prolic and inuential cultural production underscores the way capitalist society, far from being a latter-day totalitarian megamachine, hosts a plurality of cole Normale mental and institutional spaceshe himself was the product of the E rieur and became one of its professorsin which the cultural hegemony of its Supe system can be challenged, its mirrors smashed, and the spell of its ideological matrix broken. The very existence of Althussers writings on ideology can be seen as a refutation of the theory they develop, just as Margaret Thatchers pronouncement that there is no such thing as society was a contradiction in terms, since without society she would not have been able to formulate the thought behind it, let alone communicate it verbally. Even greater strides towards developing a sophisticated Marxist model of the complex relationship between ideology and culture have been made by Jacques Derrida, who ever since the 1960s has been honing the technique of deconstruction to produce tools of socio-political analysis more sophisticated than those based on the concept of mystication, alienation, or exploitation available to classic Marxism. It is a technique which in Spectres of Marx, written at the height of the ideological crisis of (Euro-)Marxist culture in the wake of the Soviet Empires dramatic collapse, he brings to bear on the language in which Marx expounded his theory of the commodication of all products of human labour under capitalism. Derrida reveals how central the metaphor of ghost and conjuring trick are to Marxs analysis of the surplus value they acquired, which he sees rooted in a complex set of subliminal and essentially false metaphysical assumptions about 89
roger grifn reality. These combine to hold together and mystify the entire existing system of productive and property relations, as well as the social, economic, and political processes that underpin them. Not only are the foundations of the capitalist system, however solid, self-evident, and eternal they may seem, an illusion, but they are based on a sustained act of illusionist magic. This gives capitalist society its spectral quality, simultaneously real and incorporeal, so that the value of every aspect of material existence within the cash nexus is somehow in the object but not of the object.45 One implication of the spectrality of the material world within capitalist culture (though arguably any human society), is that the effect of pulling objects apart from the ideological matrices in which their social meaning and economic value is embedded can be compared to an act of ssion (my analogy not Derridas). This helps explain the powerful social energies released when this is done collectively in a revolutionary moment in which an entire regime is suddenly stripped bare of its illusionist, magic powers. Bertolt Brecht hoped that his later plays would trigger precisely such a radically demystifying and liberating chain-reaction in their audiences, a negative epiphany in which modern capitalist culture was suddenly seen through, like the Wizard of Oz in the nale of the Hollywood lm, to reveal the levers, control panels, and warning lights of capitalism concealed behind the thick curtains that separate the exploiters from the exploited. More recently the rst episode of the lm trilogy The Matrixa cinematic Rohrschach test that allows those convinced of the essential unreality of contemporary modernity to see their own vision of a higher truth conrmed could be read in both Althusserian and Derridaean terms as a lived allegory of just how substantial and real capitalist modernity is at a phenomenological level to those born into the hegemonic system. It dramatizes the extreme difculty of breaking capitalisms ideological mirrors and exorcizing its cultural ghosts to achieve, not just the theoretical knowledge of, but the physical experience of its conspiratorial unreality. Even after Neo (Keanu Reeves) has chosen to take the Red Pill that will enable him to discover what the Matrix is rather than the Blue Pill that makes life go on unreectingly as before, imaginary bullets still make him bleed as long as he retains any vestige of reexive belief in the collective hallucination ring them. A moments distraction by a Woman in Red passing by in a crowd stops Neos initiation into deeper insight into the mechanics of culture in its tracks.46 In some respects seeking to probe into the relationship between ideology and culture is the academic equivalent of nding/manufacturing the Red Pill needed to break out of conventional common sense, or contradictory academic ways of seeing them. Once this threshold of self-reexivity is reached, then it is possible to move from passive descriptions of existing theories to actively formulating a heuristic framework within which the relationship can usefully be investigated. This we propose to do by offering a synthesis of the main elements we have plucked out from the oceanic secondary literature that exists on these topics. 90
ideology and culture From the Janus-headed to the dialectical The premise behind such a deliberate act of syncretism in a convoluted intellectual debate is the dialectical one that it is possible to transcend dualisms and progress from position and counter-position to a fruitful area of convergence that is experienced as higher because of its greater heuristic value. Once all notion of essential denitions of either ideology or culture have been abandoned as reications of particular constructs (ideal types), it is possible to see that the Janusheaded quality so widely recognized in the liberal human sciences actually betokens not irreconcilable contradictions, but the presence of a dialectical relationship. True to their roots in a Marxist tradition that stresses the importance of dialectics, Gramsci, Althusser, and Derrida, whatever their differences, all recognize the way both ideology and culture are able to act as complementary, interconnected historical forces which are, according to specic historical contexts, either negative or positive, either replicatory or innovatory, and hence either repressive or emancipatory. It is a realization that for a revolutionary socialist is integral to the process of raising consciousness to a point where individuals previously inveigled by capitalisms hegemony, trapped in its hall of mirrors, and in thrall to the many forms of fetishism it induces can break out of their cultural conditioning and work for societys benign transformation. The epiphanic moment this realization can induce is epitomized in William Blakes famous (pre-Marxist) cry for liberation in Jerusalem (1804): I must create my own system or be enslaved by another mans. Underlying this approach to the cultural aspect of ideology is a fundamental ethological assumption about human nature, about how human beings as a species behave in and interact with the natural world, namely that they are both conditioned by it and yet are endowed with an extraordinary capacity for acting on and changing it for better or for worse. In the realm of ideology this ambivalence manifests itself in a constant interplay between passive submission to and active contestation of the world as it presents itself through linguistically mediated thought. Indeed, Renate Holub has argued that what underpins the macro-logic of Gramscis belief in the possibility of revolutionary action to break out of the prevailing hegemony of capitalism is his keen interest in the micrological patterns that inform the relationship of consciousness and desire, in particular in the way language simultaneously enables and delimits the possibilities of freedom.
Language, in its form as a structure of values, and mediated by agents of the hegemonic class, can keep the subaltern class in check. Yet subaltern classes can invent new structures of value designed to subvert the hegemonic design. This invention is not only enabled by an inherent will to freedom, or, in the Blochian sense, by a principle of hope. For Gramsci, this invention of counter-hegemonies is in part contingent on the very structure of language itself. 47
This passage alludes to another Marxist thinker whose work is illuminates the dialectical relation of ideology and culture. Ernst Bloch devoted Herculean intellectual effort both to demystifying the prevailing hegemony of capitalism and Nazism in his native Germany,48 and to exploring the possibilities of an 91
roger grifn ideological antidote to the forces of fanaticism and terror. The basis for this he found in a faculty he termed the Not-Yet-Conscious that he considered as central to the function of the human psyche as Freuds subconscious, and it is even more constituent of human history since it accounts for the perennial primacy of the principle of hope in shaping human society.49 On the basis of this conviction, as much ideological as anthropological, Bloch came to see the bulk of cultural production as irreducibly ambivalent. It consists of ideology in the negative sense, and hence expresses a false consciousness that serves to justify, mystify, and perpetuate the hegemonic system, yet at the same time is inextricably mixed in with countervailing projections of alternative realities that point beyond the present towards a liberated future. According to Douglas Kellner, Bloch therefore provides exciting methods of cultural criticism, a new approach to cultural history, and novel perspectives on culture and ideology. In particular, he is more sophisticated than those who simply denounce all ideology as false consciousness, or who stress the positive features of socialist ideology. Rather, Bloch sees emancipatory-utopian elements in all living ideologies, and deceptive and illusory qualities as well. It follows that the task of radical cultural criticism should be to analyse both the social hopes and fantasies in cultural artefacts, as well as the ideological ways in which fantasies are presented, conicts are resolved, and potentially disruptive hopes and anxieties are managed. It is a remit which embraces not just high culture but daydreams, popular literature, architecture, department store displays, sports, or clothing, as well as Hollywood lms, network television, or other forms of mass-mediated culture.50 Towards an anthropological culturalism in ideology studies By applying a dialectical view of culture which subsumes ideology, Marxists such as Gramsci and Bloch point the way forward to resolving the sterile conict between the polarized positions that often characterize the way they are currently conceptualized at present, such as those informed by the economic determinism of the more reductionist schools of Marxism or the absolute relativism of some dialects of liberal postmodern discourse theory. They also point to substrata of human consciousness at work in the production of ideology which are not bound to any particular class or historical era, but are hardwired into human consciousness, and are thus the realm of the anthropologist rather than the political scientist. This leads us back by a different route to one of the points made by Geuss at the outset of this article, which was the need to see culture and ideology as universal elements in the empirical study of human groups, that is anthropologically. The dialectic which is unfolding, though not intrinsically Marxist, provides a context which makes an anthropological approach entirely compatible both with the demystifying thrust of the Marxist human sciences in their engagement with culture, and with their concern with diagnosing aberrant episodes in the history of ideology so as to help prepare the way for alternative, more humane futures. Thus, Marxist and liberal schools of thought themselves enter a dialectic 92
ideology and culture relationship! It is perhaps useful at this point to summon up the spectre of Derrida. On Grammatology (1967) warns that the Western human sciences are dominated by a logocentrism, which distorts our understanding of the relationship between writing and speech, and which he traces to an ethnocentrism that attaches excessive signicance to the written word at the expense of other forms of human self-expression.51 As he makes clear in his attack on the cultural hubris of Hegelian philosophy,52 Derrida is concerned to overcome in his own work one of the more serious repercussions of this ethnocentrism, namely that it encourages Western academics to devise universalizing, totalizing discourses about culture and ideology in ways that, ironically, ignore the constructions of these topics in non-European cultures and hence the insights they might bring.53 One consequence of the continuing climate of logocentrism that Derrida exposes is the tendency to ignore the ideological importance of semiotic, but non-verbal, behaviour that anthropologists are trained to decode and interpret. An example of this bias is the way historians of fascism, if they have conceded that it had an ideology at all, have in the past tended to look for empirical evidence of its existence in the speeches and writings of leaders and ideologues, rather than in the lavish displays of symbols, rituals, and theatrical politics associated with particular movements. G. L. Mosses The Nationalization of the Masses (1975), largely ignored at the time of publication, is now widely recognized as a turning point in the maturing of fascist studies54 precisely because of the conscious use it made of a paradigm drawn from cultural anthropology to illuminate an important episode in the genesis of Nazism, namely the emergence in 19th century Germany of nationalism as a secular religion with its own liturgy, cult, sacred spaces and sacral art.55 At about the same time as Mosse underwent his own cultural turn, Emilio Gentile was embarking on a long-term project of studying Fascism as a political religion, producing a steady ow of monographs and articles since the 1970s which have revolutionized the historiographical understanding of the institutional and ideological realities, policies, and actions of Mussolinis regime. In particular, he has almost single-handedly made it common sense to recognize that Fascism was driven by the concerted attempt to sacralize national politics. As such it can be seen as yet another permutation of the goal pursued by all totalitarian movements and regimes to achieve a new type of cultural hegemony, not in order to exercise power for its own sake, but to carry out an anthropological revolution through the use of an essentially ritualistic and transformative conception of politics.56 To divorce specimens of the regimes ideological production such as Mussolinis speeches from this political religion is to risk gravely misreading their historical signicance (e.g. seeing in them no more than expressions of Mussolinis megalomania). A number of premodern phenomena that fall within the remit of cultural anthropology have considerable potential relevance to understanding the ideological dynamics of modern totalitarian politics. Notable examples are the human need for delimiting sacred from profane experiences of time and space;57 the constitutive role played by ritual, cosmological myth, political liturgy, and 93
roger grifn collective ecstatic states in underpinning socio-political orders;58 the perennial human need to generate myths of spiritual rebirth and temporal renewal (palingenesis);59 and the central role played in all premodern communities by ritual techniques for reversing the disenchantment of the world, the decay of nature, and the entropy of cosmological time.60 One particularly fruitful area of potential synergy between cultural anthropology and fascist studies relates to the response of primitive societies to conjunctures of events (e.g. drought, territorial encroachment by other tribes) which cause the world to be experienced as out of joint or descending into chaos. This may provoke an intensied bout of ritualistic activity in which the tribe or people symbolically re-centre (re-ground, re-root, re-embed) themselves in reality, and thereby ensure that the symbolic axis of the world which has become dislodged once more runs through the heart (the sacred middle) of the life of the community.61 Studies of numerous examples of these revitalization movements such as the Cheyenne Ghost Dance led two eminent anthropologists to conclude that they tend to emerge during epochs of marked cultural change and its accompanying personal distress, and seek to revitalize a traditional institution, while endeavouring to eliminate alien persons, customs, values, even material culture from the experience of those undergoing painful change.62 Signicant features of such movements are the forging of a new religion syncretized from existing elements of belief, the emergence of charismatic leaders, and the creation of rituals designed to symbolically purify the new community and purge it of pollution. However, many insights are to be gleaned from conventional historiographical studies of Nazi ideology, approaching it from an anthropological perspective as a modern revitalization movement bent on founding a new total culture casts fresh light on the extraordinary displays of theatrical, cultic politics staged by the Third Reich. Far from simple exercises in propaganda or brainwashing, they can be seen as rituals celebrating the symbolic (and eugenic) welding of all ethnic Germans into a unied national community so as to regenerate the traditional institution that Germany itself constituted within the ultra-nationalist Weltanschauung. An anthropological approach also throws into relief the signicance of the extensive process of semiotic territorialization63 by which the Nazis attempted to inltrate every nook and cranny of space, both external and internal space, with the symbol of the Aryans reawakening and re-embedding in history and the soil, and its self-purging of alien inuences: the Swastika.64 Likewise, the 1934 Party Congress immortalized by Leni Riefenstahl in The Triumph of the Will is interpretable as a lavish re-centring ceremony enacted by a latter-day shaman whose speeches became a performative, incantatory acta spell in the original sense of the wordin the mythic construction of a new Germany and a new historical era out of the ashes of the Weimar Republic.65 Such a line of investigation opens up the possibility of combining insights from the Marxist concept of the aestheticization of politics and from liberal theories of political religion into a powerful heuristic device for understanding the relationship between ideology and culture in the Third Reich.66 94
ideology and culture Dining out at the end of history It should be clear from this example that the synergetic approach to the relationship between ideology and culture being explored here (which could be termed anthropological culturalism), is to be distinguished from approaches informed (or deformed) by the radically relativist deployment of post-modern, deconstructionist culturalism (postmodern culturalism) that has arisen in some areas of the human sciences since the linguistic turn. What recommends this interpretive strategy is that there is more to the reconciliation of liberal and Marxist traditions, and to attempted syntheses between the materialism and idealism of both, than some subliminal narrative drive to impose patterns derived from arithmetic progression onto external reality. Nor is it to be dismissed as the aesthetic appeal that triadic thinking exercises on thinkers and artists given to chiliastic longings, such as Rudolf Steiner67 and Herman Hesse (or, for that matter, Hegel and Marx?).68 What is becoming increasingly evident from the latest genetic research into the role of nature and nurture in forming the human personality is the dynamic interdependence of each. The psychological predispositions that are encoded in our genes lie dormant unless activated by environment and experience: genetic potentials are hatched by reality.69 The progress made by hard science in illuminating the dialectical process built into the emergence of the human personality and a sense of identity opens up the prospect that physical anthropology may come to cast light on the ethological observations of cultural anthropology by revealing the common genetic and physiological foundations of ideology and culture. This would provide a scientic underpinning to Blochs speculation about the Not-Yet-Conscious and to Gramscis intuition that the ability to envisage revolutionary transformations is somehow inscribed within the structure of language itself. Particularly promising in this respect is the growing body of scientic literature written by eminent experts from several congruent elds of expertise, notably evolutionary science,70 cognitive science,71 and the theory of consciousness,72 that point to the objective existence of memes, the cognitive equivalent of genes. It is the faithful but imperfect replication of these as yet mysterious elementary particles of consciousness that, according to memetic theory, enables human culture not only to be perpetuated, but to adapt to constantly changing physical habitats and historical conditions in the same way that genetic information is passed on through the genomes of DNA. As researchers from various disciplines pursue this hypothesis, it may become possible eventually to formulate a cogent model of ideology and culture which sees them emerging from myriad extraordinarily subtle interactions of individuals with their inherited social and natural environment taking place in ways conditioned by the irreducibly complex interplay between genes and memes. The emerging model points invigoratingly beyond reductionism73 towards a scientically defensible dialectic between conditioning and voluntarism, heredity and consciousness, determinism and free-will, matter and spirit, the coercive replication of culture and ideology and their creative adaptation. These in turn take 95
roger grifn us to the heart of what it is to be human as an animal that is simultaneously natural and historical. Such a way of conceptualizing the basic issues posed by the relationship between ideology and culture at least serves as a prophylactic against the dangers of reductionism intrinsic to a new disciplines such as neurotheology74 and which informs purported new discoveries in the physiological basis of the realm of spirit, such as the God gene.75 However, such a projected resolution of the issues posed by the relationship between ideology and culture, the loosening and eventual untying of the Gordian knots of contested semantics and methodologies in which they are entangled at present, may say more about the principle of hope at work in my own ideological stance on academic culture than about actual developments in the real world. If the current wrangles between academics instead continue ad innitum, fomented rather than resolved by new institutions such as Oxfords Centre for Political Ideologies whose very title leaves it open what it proposes to do with or for them!then it is surely important for academics not to lose sight of the fact that it is a luxury to even have the possibility of discussing their relationship. In a world that continues to host deep, and if anything deepening, cultural divides, we constitute a small caste of human beings able to situate ourselves at least for the duration of a symposium or the writing of a paper, in a hypothetical mental space outside ideology, culture, and history. From here we can at least imagine we are able momentarily to scrutinize dispassionately and ideology-less76 the cultural passions and ideological drives of the vast majority still condemned to live out the interminable eschatos of modernity. That is unless the growing human-made ecological crises in the natural world will eventually prove to have marked the end of permanent liminality, whether with a bang or a whimper, revealing modernity to have been a protracted axial age in our own civilization after all, the interregnum between a sustainable human culture on earth and either a new one, or catastrophe. In the meantime conferences on ideology of the sort that gave rise to this article may retain some echoes of Socrates original drinking feast for loquacious philosophers which bequeathed the term symposium. However, they increasingly resemble the decadent banquet for voyeuristic diners depicted in Douglas Adams The Restaurant at the End of the Universe,77 the end of the universe being the only conceivable situation in which the demise of ideology, culture, and history itself prophesied by some 20th-century pundits will nally come to pass as long as there are any human beings left alive. Acknowledgement th, I would like to acknowledge the help of Paul Jackson, Alfred Schobert, Bo Stra Michael Freeden, Joe Yannielli, in making this article more coherent. Notes and references
1. Raymond Williams, Keywords (London: Fontana, 1976), p. 87. 2. Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Denitions (New York: Randon House, 1952). 3. Malcolm Hamilton, The elements of the concept of ideology, Political Studies, 35/1 (1987), p. 19.
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del, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979). 4. Douglas R. Hofstadter, Go See particularly Chapter 20, Strange Loops, or Tangled Hierarchies. 5. Imagining is a more recently constructed construct, one that achieved considerable vogue in political science research into the ideology of nationalism after the appearance in 1991 of Benedict Andersons Imagined Communities which explored the cultural roots of nationalism as an ideology. 6. In Carrolls poem it turns out that the Snark was actually a Boojum, reminiscent of the way ideology and culture keep morphing into each other. 7. Chris Barker, Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice (London: Sage, 2000), p. 5. 8. Hamilton, op. cit., Ref. 3, p. 38. 9. See Pierre Bourdieu (Ed. Randal Johnson), The Field of Cultural Production (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1994). 10. Kroeber and Clyde, op. cit., Ref. 2, p. 181. 11. Hamilton, op. cit., Ref. 3, p. 38. 12. Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 5. 13. Geuss, ibid. 14. For a plea for the application of this principle to the study of fascism see G. L. Mosse, The Fascist Revolution (New York: Howard Fertig, 1999), p. x. 15. Ronald Grigor Suny, Back and beyond: reversing the cultural turn? American Historical Review, 107/5 (December 2002), pp. 1476 1499. 16. Suny, ibid., p. 1489. 17. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 5, cited in Suny, ibid., p. 1483. 18. Suny, ibid., p. 1485. 19. Suny, ibid., pp. 14945. 20. At a genetic level, it is DNAs capacity for imperfect replication that is now recognized by the life sciences as one of the keys to the history of evolution on Earth. 21. Cf. the concept of ideological morphology developed by Michael Freeden in Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 22. James Clifford and George Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), p. 19. 23. William H. Sewell Jr., The Concept(s) of culture, in E. Bonnell and L. Hunt (Eds), Beyond the Cultural Turn. New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 534. 24. Patrick Brantlinger, A response to Beyond the Cultural Turn, American Historical Review, 107/5 (December 2002), p. 1509. 25. Karl Jaspers rst introduced this (inevitably contested) concept in The Origin and Goal of History tr. Michael Bullock (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953; rst German edition 1949). It has been taken up by Arnold Gehlen and outside Germany as well: see the ve volumes of Johann P. Arnason, S. N. Eisenstadt and rn Wittrock (Eds), Axial Civilizations and World History (Leiden: Brill, 2005). On modernitys Bjo experience of permanent liminality in contrast to premodern societies transitional phases of liminality see Arpad Szakolczai, Reexive Historical Sociology (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 21629. 26. Lewis Mumford, The Transformation of Man (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1956). 27. Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964; 1st edition, 3 vols. Munich, Zurich: Rhein-Verlag, 19311932), p. 480. 28. Broch, ibid., pp. 445 8. 29. Max Weber, The meaning of ethical neutrality, in E. Shils and H. Finch (Eds), Max Weber on the Methodology of the Social Sciences (Glecoe, IL: The Free Press, 1949), pp. 20 1. 30. A seminal work in this context is Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time (London: Verso: 1995). 31. G. L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses (New York: Howard Fertig, 1975). 32. Emilio Gentile, Le religioni della politica (Rome, Bari: Laterza, 2001). 33. Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, translated by Shaun Whiteside, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), p. 110. 34. It also should be noted that when placed in an international context, culture is much more language-specic ` and cultura together cover the main connotations of English than ideology in its usage: e.g. in Italian civilta culture, whereas Kultur in German retains a considerable historical baggage that it does not have in English, and civilisation in French often has positive cultural connotations of artistic and intellectual achievement that it lacks in English. See for example Alfed Meyers appendices A and B to Kroeber and Kluckhorn, op. cit., Ref. 2, and the brief discussion of its relationship to the term civilization (pp. 113).
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35. Geuss, op. cit., Ref. 12, pp. 1222. 36. Letter from Engels to Franz Mehring, London, July 14, 1893, in (Lewis Feuer Ed.) Marx and Engels. Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy (London: Fontana, 1969), pp. 4467. 37. E.g. Raymond Williams, Base and superstructure in marxist cultural theory, in Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980). 38. See particularly Lenins essays On co-operation and better fewer, but better, in Robert C. Tucker (Ed.), The Lenin Anthology (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1975), pp. 707 13. 39. An important exploration of these ambiguities is provided by Walter Adamson, Hegemony and Revolution: a Study of Antonio Gramscis Political and Cultural Theory (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980). 40. The classic passage in which Gramsci rejects the traditional Marxist concept of ideology as false consciousness is to be found in Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (Eds) (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), pp. 376 7. 41. John Adams, Letter to Hazekiah Niles, 15 February 1818, quoted in G. Seldes, The Great Thoughts (New York: Ballantine, 1985), p. 7. 42. Louis Althusser, Ideology and ideological state apparatuses: Notes towards an investigation, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), p. 115. 43. Louis Althusser, Essays on Ideology (London, New York: Verso, 1971), pp. 545. 44. Althusser, op. cit., Ref. 42, pp. 523. 45. See particularly Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx (London: Routledge, 1994), Chapter 5, Apparition of the inapparent, the phenomenal conjuring trick, pp. 12576. At one point (p. 152) Derrida alludes to the link between commodity fetishism in Marxist thought and the anthropological concept of animism which endows all objects and material world with a spirit in some pre-capitalist societies, a theme well worth developing to establish the continuity between archetypal and modern aspects of human culture. iz ek, The Matrix, or two sides of perversion, Philosophy Today, 43 (1999). 46. Cf. Slavoj Z 47. Renate Holub, Gramscis theory of consciousness: between alienation, reication and Blochs principle of hope, Antonio Gramsci, Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 115 6. 48. Principally in Ernst Bloch, Die Erbschaft unserer Zeit (1935), translated as Heritage of Our Times (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990). 49. Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung (1955), translated as The Principle of Hope (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). 50. Cf. Douglas Kellner, Ernst Bloch, utopia and ideology critique, downloadable from his critical theory website (Illuminations) at: http://www.uta.edu/english/dab/illuminations/kell1.html (25/10/04) 51. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University, 1976 (1st edition 1967). 52. Jacques Derrida, Glas: que reste-t-il du savoir absolu? (Paris: Denoel, 1981), English translation John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand Glas, (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1986). The title Deathknell alludes not just to the end of the absolutist claims to knowledge typical of 19th century Western thought, but of Western ethnocentrism generally with respect to culture. 53. For an example of a non-European perspective on human existence which throws into relief the Eurocentrism of most academic literature on issues relating to culture, ideology, and creativity, see Amit Gowami, The SelfAware Universe (London: Simon & Schuster, 1993). 54. See Roger Grifn, The primacy of culture. The current growth (or manufacture) of consensus within Fascist studies, Journal of Contemporary History, 37/1 (2002), pp. 2143. 55. See Roger Grifn, Withstanding the rush of time. The prescience of G. L. Mosses anthropological approach to fascism, in Stanley Payne (Ed.), What History Tells: George L. Mosses Study of Modern Europe (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin, 2003). 56. See Emilio Gentile, Fascism, totalitarianism and political religion: Denitions and critical reections on the critiques of a theory, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 5/3 (Winter 2004). 57. E.g. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of Eternal Return (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971; 1st edition 1949). 58. E.g. Clifford Geertz, The Theatre State in Bali (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). 59. Again Mircea Eliades works are pivotal here. For more on the concept palingenesis see Roger Grifn, The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1993), Chapter 2. 60. E.g. William Sullivan, The Secret of the Incas Myth: Astronomy, and the War Against Time (New York: Crown Publishers, 1996). 61. E.g. D. Freidel, et al., Maya Cosmos (New York: William R. Morrow, 1993). 62. Victor and Edith Turner, Religious celebrations, in Victor and Edith Turner (Eds), Celebration. Studies in Festivity and Ritual (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982), pp. 211 2.
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63. For an example of the application of this concept (rst elaborated by G. Deleuze and F. Guattari) to cultural Rabasa, Inventing A-m e-r-i-c-a. Spanish Historiography and the Formation of imperialism see Jose Eurocentrism (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993). 64. See Malcolm Quinn, The Swastika (London: Routledge, 1994). 65. An example of an anthropological work which has a bearing on Nazi ritual politics is Angela Hobarts Healing Performances of Bali: Between Darkness and Light. Community Well-being and the Religious Festival (Oxford: Berghahn, 2003). 66. For an experiment in this combination see Roger Grifn, Notes towards the denition of fascist culture: the prospects for synergy between Marxist and liberal heuristics, Renaissance and Modern Studies, 42 (Autumn 2001), pp. 95115. 67. Triadic progression is central to Steiners Theosophy. An introduction to supersensible world knowledge and the purpose of humanity (1904). 68. For the importance of the triad as a basic Gestalt in Hesses work see Theodore Ziolkowski, The Novels of Hermann Hesse. A Study in Theme and Structure (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974). 69. See Matt Ridley, Nature via Nurture. Genes, Experience, and What Makes us Human (London: Fourth Estate, 2003). 70. See The Selsh Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), Chapter 11. The prototype of the meme concept was rst proposed in Richard Semon, Die Mneme als erhaltendes Prinzip im Wechsel des organischen Geschehens [The mneme as the principle of conservation in the ux of organic life] (3rd edition Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1911), rst published in 1904. 71. See particularly Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 72. See the section The third evolutionary process: Memes and cultural evolution, in Daniel Dennett (Ed.), Consciousness Explained (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991). 73. An allusion to a pioneering collection of essays crude refuting determinist models of the human: see Arthur Koestler and J. R. Smythies (Eds), Beyond Reductionism (London: Hutchinson Publishing Group, 1969). Other seminal works on this theme are Arthur Koestler, Ghost in the Machine (London: Hutchinson Publishing Group, 1967); and Karl R. Popper and John C. Eccles, The Self and Its Brain (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1977). 74. R. Joseph (Ed.), NeuroTheology. Brain, Science, Spirituality and Religious Experience (Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 2002). 75. Dean Hamer, The God Gene. How Faith is Hardwired into our Genes (New York: Doubleday, 2004). 76. Only phenomenologically, of course, since to step outside the force-elds of ideology and culture is impossible, and hence a fertile heuristic ction, like the square root of minus 1 and other imaginary numbers. 77. Douglas Adam, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (London: Pan, 1980): see especially Chapter 17.
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Journal of Political Ideologies

Ideology and culture

Roger Griffina a Department of History, Oxford Brookes University,

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Journal of Political Ideologies (February 2006), 11(1), 7799

Ideology and culture

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ideology and culture

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