Ideology and Ideological Subjects

From MarxWiki

In `Gramsci's Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity` Stuart Hall lays out his interpretation of Gramsci's writings, then uses Gramsci's theorizations to analyize how we think about race and racism.

Ideology and Ideological Subjects

Gramsci’s definition of ideology, “a conception of the world . . . which becomes a cultural movement, a ‘religion’, a ‘faith’, that has produced some type of practical activity or will in which a philosophy is contained as an implicit theoretical ‘premiss’,” emphasizes not only the philosophical core of ideologies but also organic ideologies that touch practical, everyday common sense and “organize human masses and create the terrain on which men move, acquire consciousness of their position, struggle, etc.”

Gramsci is thus concerned with practical consciousness, or common sense of ideological subjects. According to Gramsci, a class will always an instinctive understanding of its basic conditions and the nature of constrains and exploitation visited upon it. But its up to political education and cultural politics to take these understandings and re-shape them into a more coherent political or philosophical theory or current.

Gramsci’s theorizations of ideology have six important implications:

1. Popular beliefs are arenas of struggle and material forces that must be addressed in creating or resisting hegemony.

2. It requires an exensive cultural and ideological struggle to bring about the ethical and intellectual untity that hegemony requires. As Hall writes elsewhere, “it is almost as if the ideological dogcatchers have to be sent out every morning to round up the ideological strays, only to be confronted by a new group of loose mutts the next day.”

3. The subjects of ideology are never pre-unified under an ideology: for example, the proletarian with “correct” revolutionary thoughts or blacks with already guaranteed anti-racist consciousness do not exist.

4. The ideological field is always articulated to different social and political positions, but its shape and structure do not precisely mirror the class structure of society, nor can it be reduced to economics.

5. Ideologies are not born in each individual brain, but are sustained and transformed within the institutions of civil society and the state.

6. Ideological change is conceived not in terms of substituting one ideology for another, but instead the articulation and disarticulation of ideas.