Marxism 2: Ideology

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Marxism 2 Ideology Hegemony
Althusser, Louis (1918-1990)

Antonio Gramsci(1891-1937)
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Marxism Topics Schools on Focus
Vulgar Marxism Karl Marx Dialectic Materialism, Class Commodification
Western Marxists Althussers theory of Ideology Gramscis Hegemony Literature Society
American British Marxism Jameson and Eagleton Marxist Literary Criticism
Foucault ???????????? Literature as Discourse
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Outline

• Marx Q A
• A. Superstructure and Base Debates and Related
  Issues
• B. Ideology
• Ideology defined
• L. Althusser
• Examples of Ideology
• C. Social Structure vs. Social Formation and
  Over-Determination
• D. A Marxist Reading More Examples for Analysis
  
• The Great Gastby (excerpt)
• A. Gramsci
• Examples of hegemony
• References and for next time

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Marx Q A

• What is materialist determinism? (chap 5 82-)
• What are the evils of capitalism according to
  Marx? (e.g. chap 5 83 chap 6 83)
• Is class relationor relation of productionstill
  relevant today?
• Why do we desire more than we need? Why are
  commodities fetishized?

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Superstructure vs. Economic Basein the History
of Marxism

• Marx, Lenin ? Stalins politicization of
  literature
• Marx, Lenin ? Western Marxism (e.g. Lukacs,
  Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno)
• (chap 5 84 chap 6 84)
• Poststructuralist Marxism -- Althusser
• Neo-Marxists use of Gramsci

1. (lit. as propaganda)
2. Realism vs. Modernism debate their critique of
   culture industry and belief in human agency
   (variations of reflectionism)
3. Over-determination
4. Conflicting Hegemonies

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Literature Society (1)

• Literature of Commitment Reflectionism (chap 5
  87-89)
• Functions criticizing the wrong, and bringing
  changes. (critics as a warning system or a
  mentor)
• Mode realism as a prefer genre? (88)
• Related questions about political correctness
• -- What are the functions of literature?
• -- Is good literature politically committed
  literature?
• -- Does literature have to reflect its society,
  or help promote a certain political cause? (e.g.
  The Education of Little Tree ref. Forrest Carter
  1, 2)
• -- On the other hand, can literature or art works
  be completely un-political or negative?

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Literature Society (2)

• Ways of reflecting society indirectly
• not through content but through forms (e.g.
  fragmentary form as a way to reflect social
  fragmentation)
• incorporating different ideologies
• the political unconscious.

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Are we blind to our own ideologies?

• Why?

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Ideology Defined

• rigid set of ideas e.g. somebody refrains from
  eating meat for practical rather than
  ideological reasons. ???????? -(general usage)
  negative
• ruling ideology legitimating the power of the
  dominant group (Marx) negative (chap 5 86)
• sets of ideas to justify certain organized social
  actions --could be positive or negative (? like
  hegemony) (chap 5 86)
• sets of ideas to misrepresent the world (and our
  relations) to us, in order justify certain
  actions while masking their real nature.
  negative ? They look natural. (chap 6
  84-85)

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Althusser, Louis (1918-1990)

• Born 1918 in Algiers
• Joined the Communist Party in Paris in 1948.
• Attempted to reconcile Marxism with
  Structuralism.
• Influential works For Marx (1965) and Lenin and
  Philosophy (1969).
• Note Murdered his wife in 1980, and was confined
  to an asylum till his death in 1990.
• (source)

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Althussers Revision of Marxism

• Ideology
• Sees Ideology not as just ideas or false
  consciousness (which implies true
  consciousness)
• Subjectivation Explains both social structure
  and individuals subject position in relation to
  ideology.
• Social Formation
• Against reflectionism, argues for Literatures
  relative autonomy from Base it is determined
  by Base in the last instance (ultimately) (more
  later)

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Why is it natural? Why are we blind?

• Natural
• We are born into ideologies, always already
  interpellated as subject (We take different
  subject positions in ideologies.)
• Ideologies speak to us and for us.
• Blind
• ideologies disguise real relations present
  imaginary relations.

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Ideology Defined by Althusser

• Subject Being subject to Ideology Ideology has
  the function of constituting individual as
  subjects.
• (not used) Interpellation a.????(??) the formal
  right of a parliament to submit formal questions
  to the government
• (used) Interpellation ?the police act of
  interpelling someone a policeman hailing us
  hey you! ? guilty subject. Ref.)
• Ideology as Misrepresentation Ideology is a
  Representation of the Imaginary Relationship of
  Individuals to their Real Conditions of
  Existence.
• Systematic Control by Consent Ideology is not
  any idea it should be a system of ideas
  (representation) produced by some institutions
  (state apparatuses ????)
• (Mis-Representation, or Mis-Recognition from
  Lacans idea of mirror stage. Society produces
  us as subject in its own image. Chap 6 p. 86)

• (chap 6 85)

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Ideologies Examples

• Ideology is not a singular idea it works in a
  system
• to justify some power, support some relations.

• Which of the following are part of a certain
  ideology
• -- produced by some ISA, distorting some reality
  ?

1. Nationalism patriotism cosmopolitanism used in
   ads
2. The Taiwanese? populism
3. Supporting the school as an ISA in patriarchal
   society
4. Supporting the authorities of a certain Church or
   priest confirmed by church services.
5. --so the myth of ???? is a mere superstition.
6. --so I can love anyone Id like.
7. --so we should not expect men to comfort or
   support others.

• ????????????????????
• ???????
• 2. ???????,???????
• 3. ????,?????
• 4. God is truth.
• 5. The Earth is round.
• 6. It is human to love.
• 7. Men are from Mars women from Venus.

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Social Structureof Vulgar Marxist

• Ideology the ruling ideas of the ruling class
  imposed on the other classes.

• Superstructure
• e.g. Literature of the middle class,
• of proletariat

Parallel, reflect
Base(as foundation, center) relations of
production, means of production
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1. Literature/Culture Economic Base
Social Formation for Althusser

• relatively autonomous from
• reflect, embody, perform, transform, critique

Social Levels
Multiple Ideologies
2. Social Multiple Causality Over-determination
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Social Formation -- de-centered

• State Apparatuses (Repressive Ideological)

??
??
??
ISA
??
RSA
??
??
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Lit. work Relative autonomous

• over-determined
• economic influences mediated (??) through
  various ISAs

Base Base Base Base Base
? ?
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How do we do a Marxist reading??

• (ref. chap 5 p. 88-89) Power/Class Relations
  shown in the text, its character relations,
  setting, as well as its background
• The role of capitalism, workers, commodities
• ideologies
• -- identifying them and the social practices
  which support them
• -- discover contradictions between different
  ideologies

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Ideology an Artistic Example

• From Titians Venus of Urbino (1538)

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Venus of Urbino (1538)

• Revises Giorgione's The Sleeping Venus (1510)
• Titians
• a flesh-and-blood beauty, awake and fully aware
  of the viewer's presence. (ref)
• An allegory of lustful love (with signs of her
  hand, rose)
• Celebration of marital love
• (with signs of praying, white dress, the
  dogloyalty, and myrtle (???)constancy

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Ideology an Artistic Example

• To Manets Olympia (1863) pay attention to her
  gaze, her hand, the black woman and the black
  cat.

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Ideology an Artistic Example

• Manets Olympia
• --multiple ideologies
• sexual capitalism (prostitution) presented, and
  critiqued?
• -- Not Venus, nor Eve or Danaë, a real
  prostitute
• -- the womans direct stare and upright pose,
  the strong hand
• The blackness inscribed as a contrast. (no
  backdrop to suggest any symbolic or mythic depth
  of this space,

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Ideology some CFs

• ???

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Contemporary Ideology of Love stereotypes

• Love motorcycle or car supporting tolerant and
  strong men vs. wayward or weepy women

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Commodification of Love no fixed or human
object of love

• ????-???-???? (cell phone as my dear )
• ????-i??369??-???? (because the cell phone rate
  is cheap)

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The Great Gatsby General Introd.

• Setting in New York City and Long Island in
  1922.
• 1920 (Roaring 20s) is a time when the American
  society experienced a cultural and lifestyle
  revolution. In the economic arena, the stock
  market boomed, the rich spent money on fabulous
  parties and expensive acquisitions, but they are
  morally irresponsible. (e.g.)
• Narrator Nick Carraway going to the East as an
  initiation to the world of wealth and corruption.

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Jordan Bakers carelessness

• Nick You're a rotten driver, either you ought to
  be more careful or you oughtn't to drive at all.
• Jordan I am careful.
• Nick No you're not.
• Jordan Well, other people are.
• Nick What's that got to do with it
• Jordan They'll keep out of my way, It takes two
  to make an accident
• Nick Suppose you met somebody just as careless
  as yourself?
• Jordan I hope I never will, I hate careless
  people. That's why I like you.

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The Great Gatsby General Introd. (2)

• Symbols East Egg (the rich area for the
  aristocrats) and the West Egg (the newly rich )
  on Long Island, parties, green light and, the
  valley of ashes
• The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg blue and
  gigantic--- They look out of no face but,
  instead, from a pair of enormous yellow
  spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose.

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The Great Gatsby General Introd. (3)

• Nick refrain from judgment at the beginning?
  rejecting humans at the end.
• I would want no more privileged glimpses into
  the human heart. Only my neighbour, Gatsby, would
  be exempt from my reaction. For Gatsby turned
  out all right in the end it is what preyed on
  Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his
  dream.

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Gs Passion vs. the Moral Desert Paralysis

• Foul dust -- undesirable desire
• Daisy and Toms marriage
• The superficial parties
• Toms for Myrtle (his mistress, who fight with
  him all the time)
• Nicks relationship with Jordan Baker
• How about Gatsbys love for Daisy?
• And Nick's interest in Gatsby the bootlegger,
  hoodlum, millionaire and what he represents ? The
  American Dream (green backs Nature)??

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Literary Example -- The Great Gatsby first
reunion (clip 5100)

• How are images of romance and money intertwined
  in the first excerpt?
• Contradiction 1
• Images of wealth Ds brass buttons, Gs gold
  toilet
• Images of romance beauty, tears, light, flowers,
  
• Images of social power nature Images of
  nature names, guests in Gs mansion ? which
  represents his social power
• Gs romantic sentiments throwing clothes
  at Daisy

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Literary Example -- The Great Gatsby first
reunion (clip 5100)

• Contradiction 2 alienation or splitting of the
  signifiers (their exchange values) from the
  signified (the black market).
• S-ier (1) Gs house catching light, splendor ?
  S-ied how he earns the money.
• S-ier (2) Daisys evaluation matters. (Rich
  girls dont marry poor boys)
• The symbol the green light --1. green pasture,
  2. green light ( Daisy), 3. green bills

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Literary Example -- The Great Gatsby the past

• What does the past Daisy mean to Gatsby?
• He has to go back to the past to sort things out.
  
• Images of ascendance (ladder) to life and wonder
  (milk of wonder)
• Daisy perishable, only an incarnation of
  something else. ? social position or fullness of
  life, or both?
• Nicks response An elusive rhythm, a fragment of
  lost words (Dream regressive, inarticulate)

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The Great Gatsby the ending

• Green light again more important than Daisy
• And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown
  world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first
  picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's
  dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn,
  and his dream must have seemed so close that he
  could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know
  that it was already behind him, somewhere back in
  the vast obscurity beyond the city, where the
  dark fields of the republic rolled on under the
  night.
• Gatsby believes in the green light, the orgiastic
  (?????) future that year by year recedes before
  us. It eluded us then, but thats no
  matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch our
  arms out farther . . . so we beat on, boats
  against the current, born back ceaselessly into
  the past.

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The Great Gatsby undesirable desire (2)

• Daisyactually undesirable, too.
• G (about Daisy) Her voice is full of money
• N It was full of moneythat was the
  inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the
  cymbals song of it . . . High in a white palace
  the kings daughter, the golden girl.
• The undesirable to replace the unnamable.
• The American Dream for Fitzgerald pure at first
  but polluted by materialism
• But is American Dream desirable?

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GG in the context of Modernism(for your
reference)

• The moderns -- a simultaneity of incongruities
  and paradoxes.
• Modernism was defined as a time of "refusal"--of
  middle-class pieties, scientific or philosophic
  certainty, propriety, tradition, and faith
  (Hoffman 32-33, 40 qtd Kaplan 145).
• ? setting up untraditional tradition looking
  for undesirable desire.

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GG in the context of Modernism(for your
reference 2)

• Undesirable desire is a guilty pleasure, not a
  mere paradox or incongruity.
• The trope of undesirable desire provided a covert
  means of getting in on cultural debates over
  national belonging, of participating--through the
  construction of desirable and undesirable love
  objects--in the national debate over who was and
  was not a desirable American and why. (Kaplan
  147) ? American Dream as a means of
  self-justification

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The Great Gatsby and The Ideology of American
Dream

• The Dreams Material Base Capitalist pursuit and
  acquisition. (the real condition)
• Imaginary Relation represented by Gatsby band the
  green light the fallible but desirable? We
  The Americans turn out alright at the end.
• ? Daisy and Tom, the undesirable.
• But the problem is that its hard to distinguish
  them from each other.

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From Ideology to Hegemony

1. Gramsci considers the role of the organic
   intellectual and competing hegemonies
   (heterogeneous and always being modified).
2. Hegemony Dominant Ideology, but not always
   controlling us.

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Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)

• Supporter of Russian revolution and activist in
  socialist transformation throughout the advanced
  capitalist world.
• Arrested in 1926, kept in prison 1928 1937,
  where he wrote the Prison Notebook.

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Hegemony control by consent

• Chap 6 88-89)
• Ideological leadership consensual control
• "...Dominant groups in society, including
  fundamentally but not exclusively the ruling
  class, maintain their dominance by securing the
  'spontaneous consent' of subordinate groups,
  including the working class, through the
  negotiated construction of a political and
  ideological consensus which incorporates both
  dominant and dominated groups." (Strinati, 1995
  165)
• (source http//www.theory.org.uk/ctr-gram.htmhege
  )

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Gramsci hegemony not secure

• not given to the dominant group, but "has to be
  won, reproduced, sustained."
• Hegemony can only be maintained so long as the
  dominant classes succeed in framing all competing
  definitions within their range... so that the
  subordinate groups get either controlled or
  contained within an ideological space . . (13
  Norton 2455.)

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Hegemony examples images of the Blacks

• Winning spontaneous consent through
  granting of
  superficial 'concessions' (Strinati,1995167 qtd
  Mystry).
• This involves the dominant group making
  'compromises' that are (or appear as) favourable
  to the dominated group, but that which actually
  do nothing to disrupt the hegemony of the
  dominators.

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black images

• I. Three stereotypes Mammy, slaves, clown (e.g.
  TV minstrel show) ?spontaneous consensus to their
  slavery or inferiority.
• II. Positive images based on normative white
  ideals
• Images in late 80s e.g.
• --the middle-class household of
• The Cosby Show points out that
• there is 'nothing black' about
• the Huxtable's lifestyle
• (Mercer 19896 qtd in Mystry).

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Strategies of containment
Sympathy shown for the minorities, but with the
whites as the real heroes.

• Counter Hegemonic Practices e.g. Hip Hop.

• e.g. Cry Freedom
• The Last of the Mohicans,
• Dances with Wolves

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References

• Louis Althusser Archive http//www.marxists.org/r
  eference/archive/althusser/
• Kaplan, Carla Undesirable Desire Citizenship
  and Romance in Modern American Fiction Modern
  Fiction Studies 43.1 (1997) 144-169.
• An Introduction to Gramsci's Life and
  Thought http//www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/in
  tro.htm
• Antonio Gramsci http//www.theory.org.uk/ctr-gram.
  htm
• Mistry, Reena. Can Gramsci's theory of hegemony
  help us to understand the representation of
  ethnic minorities in western television and
  cinema? http//www.theory.org.uk/ctr-rol6.htm

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Next time Marxist Literary Criticism

• (Reader chap 5 chap 6 review)
• F. Jameson T. Eagleton as a focus.
• "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock ?
  ideologies of the author, the genre and the time?
  
• Find an example of an ideology yourself.
• Ref.
• Song Suicided by Society http//www.youtube.com/
  watch?vcQJGhYTh7Rs
• animation LoveSong of J. Alfred Prufrock Rev.
  Animation http//www.youtube.com/watch?v6LsHkr2b-
  b0