exchange-value (EV): for commodities to be exchanged, another value must be abstracted from the object, so that the object can be put into equivalence with different kinds of objects. At the point where an object acquires EV, it becomes a commodity: x amount of bread equals y amount of clothing. EV is completely dissociated from UV: the only thing two exchangeable commodities have in common is the amount of labor-power that it took to produce them.
a commodity: represents a given amount of labor-value, which we think is always rationalized (i.e., a thing is worth some determinate proportion of what it cost to produce).
the fetishism of commodities: Marx's term for the practice of seeing the EV of a commodity as inherent in the object, rather than deriving from its labor-value.
Ideology as false consciousness: e.g., the bourgeoisie see the EV of a commodity as its real value; but the proletariat is in a position to realize that the labor-value of a commodity is its true value. When this realization is catalyzed and the subject-object dialectic achieves a synthesis, the consciousness of the proletariat--which is by his definition non-ideological--is formed.
Althusser argues that while Marxist theorists have paid a great deal of attention to one aspect of the base--the means of production--they have slighted another aspect--the relations of production, especially the ways in which labor power is continually supplied.
The state: Althusser's name for the superstructure. The state insures the reproduction of the relations of production, in two ways: (1) by ensuring that the means of production are reproduced and remain under the control of the capitalists; (2) by ensuring that an appropriate labor force always exists.
SUPERSTRUCTURE = the stateBASE = relations of prod. = means of prod. + productive forces (i.e. labor)
Repressive State Apparatuses (RSA): Those related to the state such as government, army, police, legal system, prisons.
Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA): these are diverse, but include: the educational system, political parties, the family, religion (less important under capitalism than formerly), communications media, culture (art, literature, etc.)
SUPERSTRUCTURE = the state = RSAs + ISAsBASE = relations of prod. = means of prod. + productive forces (i.e. labor)
Ideology, as Althusser defines it: an imaginary representation of the relation of individuals to their real conditions of existence. It is the job of ISAs to produce these representations: to make the existing economic base, and an individual's place in it, seem appropriate, reasonable, and natural.
Identification effects.
(1) Through the reality effect, readers identify with the subjects of literary texts and thus come to see themselves as subjects. What character you identify with doesn't matter. What matters is that you see yourself as a potential subject of the world represented in the text, which means seeing yourself as an actual subject of the "real" world (the world reflected in/represented by the text's world).
(2) But a subtler and more significant kind of identification effect is being produced as well, at the same time, at the level of style: Literature establishes a special language, which is then imposed on all as the "common" language even though it is the language of the class who control the production of literature (i.i. the bourgeoisie): rules of correct thought and expression are established, and these are the property of the owning class. By reading, you participate in the dominance of the bourgeois ideology through immersion in bourgeois language practices. This is why literature is such an important tool of the educational ISA--why there are literature courses in schools even though most people don't need to know about literature in order to do their jobs.
dominant culture: (hegemonic)
alternative culture:
oppositional culture: (counter-hegemonic)
residual culture: one that was prominent at a particular period of history, but is no longer hegemonic.
Hegemony: A concept borrowed from the work of Antonio Gramsci, esp. the Prison Notebooks (1927-35). Gramsci distinguishes between rule (direct political coercion) and hegemony (the totality of the distributions of power and influence in a given social formation). This may sound like Althusser's distinction between RSAs and ISAs, but Williams would distinguish hegemony from ideology in the following way: To distinguish hegemony from ideology, we might say that when hegemony becomes conscious or visible, it takes the form of ideology. Hegemony is the process through which a given structure of class domination is internalized and therefore lived as "reality." For Williams, the dominant and the hegemonic are roughly interchangeable terms. He elaborates the definition in Marxism and Literature (1977).
Emergent ideology: Ideology, if it is functioning perfectly, will disguise inequalities and resolve contradictions, so that hegemony is maintained. But in fact ideology may not always function perfectly to resolve contradictions. Emergent ideologies attempt to alter fundamentally the ownership of the means of production.
Williams's categories--especially "emergent ideology"--may seem to be more flexible than Althusser's monolithic use of the Base/Superstructure metaphor. On the other hand, when inflected through the practice of deconstruction or the category of negation, the base/superstructure metaphor can be less crude than Williams would make it out to be. An important question within the base-superstructure metaphor is that of the direction of determinism. (Usually, we think of a base holding up a superstructure--but the weight of a superstructure can stress a foundation, which, if it collapses, will need to be built in a new way.)
Althusser and Williams both insist that ideology has a material existence--that is, it exists in material practices and institutions: the family, the church, the arts, whatever. All of these are material forms, which determine the consciousness of the individual. But the question is, how are the material forms and practices that constitute ideology themselves determined? In answering this question, theory will only get us so far, by providing some analytical categories. We need to test the usefulness of the categories through cultural analysis.
The category of hegemony may be more useful than any idea of Base/Superstructure for analyzing most cultural practices.
Two basic theses for a Marxist cultural analysis:
"The sum of total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises the legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness" (Marx, Preface to Critique of Political Economy, in McLellan 389).
"It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness" (Marx, qtd.in McLellan 389.)
We could, for example, analyze the ideology of psychoanalysis, which is a particular kind of practice--maybe part of the medical ISA, maybe an ISA in itself that for some people replaces the church. In any case, we would start with a critique of the history of the individual psyche as Freud described it, and show how that structure was produced by the the ISA of "the family": that Freud's model descibes the dynamics of consciousness under a particular material structure in which the father is an authority figure, in which all compete for his attention, whih necessarily has finite limits, that male children are expected one day to occupy the position of the father within the family structure--etc. Carrying out the analysis is less important than recognizing that the model of the psyche as Freud described it is not inherent in human nature, but is rather produced by a certain kind of social organization that happens to be the most efficient for reproduding the relations of production at a certain stage of capitalism.
But I would like to consider the ISA of "the family" in itself, precisely because Althusser's location of the family within the state may seem to be problematic. I would like to start with a relatively recent development in the ideology of the family: the woman who has a career outside the home.
Note: we would need to investigate the ideology of the term "career"--as opposed to "job"--in order to be thorough. But let's assume that we know what this is and concentrate on the period in which it became widely acceptable for women to work outside the home on a regular basis.
During WWII, many women worked outside the home--we have a stereotype of "Rosie the Riveter" (an ideological consctruction that legitimated women as wage laborers). Obviously, this was required by the economic base for a short while, since the labor pool diminished with men going to war, while consumption increased with materials being expended in the war. Thus production had to increase and women were the obvious labor pool.
The reconstrction of the nuclear family in the 50s was also accomplished ideologically: look at the plots of movies from the 50s, in which an independent girl learns to want a home and children. Or look at the family structures represented on "Leave it to Beaver" or "Father Knows Best."
However, the reality was that more and more women were beginning to work for wages: the reality of the economic base was that it was beginning to take more than one working-class income to support a working-class household.
In the 70s, this economic phenomenon began to be true of the so-called "middle-class" as well. Today, it seems true that it requires two middle-class jobs to support the style of living that has conventionally been associated with the middle class. Note: part of the ideology here is that one's social status in America must at least equal that of one's parents: the social structure must reproduce itself, because the economic base must reproduce itself.
The economic base was changing in the 70s: manufacturing was becoming less profitable. In fact, Marx predicted the decling rate of profit, in real terms, of industrial capitalism. If yoru rate of profit declines, you must pay workers a lesser percent of that profit. Inflation insured that dollar amounts would look like they continued to climb, but in real terms, the purchasing power of the wrker declined: they were in effect being paid less. But to maintain the kind of (professional) labor force required by the base and the level of consumption that supports the base, you need to reproduce the existing social structure.
To maintain profit levels, you need to decrease wages in real terms while increasing consumption and production. If the family is considered as a unit of consumption, by permitting two workers to work, even at decreased wages, you will increase consumption and supply the demand of that consumption by increased production. If middle-class families were to increase their consumption (or at any rate not decrease them), two workers could work. A decline in real wages--and women earning less wages than men for the same work--takes care of the decreasing profit margin.
Additionally, the character of the base was changing: an "information" and "service" economy supplants manufacturing. These economies can operate with a part-time (i.e. lower-wage) work force and more flexible hours.
I'm not an economist--my only point is that at precisely this moment in economic history, feminism began to make great gains, and an ideology developed in which it was permitted for women to work for wages--in the name of "self-fulfillment" (i.e., becoming an individual on the same terms that men were regarded as individuals). Thus we see an emergent ideology.
But how does the working wife feel? Uneasy, perhaps, especially if she has children--that is, there is a dominant ideology here: women are not living the same lives as their mothers, lives that they have been shown are supposedly good lives: dominant and emergent ideologies are in conflict.
How then is the emergent ideology incorporated into the dominant, in a way that ensures the reproduction of the means of production? One means: child-care is just expensive enough that many women are on the border between working outside the home and not working outside the home. The economic base cannot support a total entry of all women into the work force at this time: day-care can raise children in a more economically efficient way than the nuclear family, but the economic base couldn't stand the implications of this. There has been some talk of an all-year school calendar; whether this cahnge in the ideology of education is implemented will be determined by the production and consumption patterns that such a move would produce, in combination with profit margins.
Capitalism is remarkably adaptable, remarkably able to incorporate emergent ideologies into the dominant: The point of this analysis is to suggest that the ideology of the family will change in relation to changes in the economic base--but that new ideologies can make samll alterations in the economic base as well: we have discovered that child-care can be reconfigured in terms of wage labor. If child-care becomes profitable and is thus incorporated in a substantial way into the economic base, a radically new ideology of the family could replace the one we have.
In Althusserian terms, then, ideology can impact the base, but in the last instance, the base will determine the form of ideology that will guarantee its own reproduction: the entry of women into the labor market in large numbers may require a change in the ideology of the family. But it does not change the class system--i.e. the relation of all workers to the capitalist mode of production.
However, if we saw a total entry of women into the work force, which would only happen if required by the economic base, perhaps the size of the proletariat would reach a critical mass, its consciousness would finally be catalyzed: a socialist or socialist-feminist program could be realized.
What, then does any of this have to do with literature?
1. The first kind, a kind that Williams would argue does not go far enough or may even be irrelevant, would treat the text as an object and use marxist categories to describe the relations of the parts of the object, e.g.:
Central questions would then become:
Conclusion: we can't do a marxist analysis of the text without analyzing its social context, especially the practices of movie-going, film-making, etc. that structured the production, circulation, and consumption of the text. Formal analysis of the text itself must always keep these larger questions in mind.
Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, 1971. 123-73.
Balibar, Etienne, and Pierre Macherey. "On Literature as an Ideological Form." Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader. Ed. Robert Young. Boston and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981.
Baudrillard, Jean. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981.
Lukcs, Georg. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. 1922. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971.
Marx, Karl. "Preface to A Critique of Political Economy." Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Ed. David McLellan. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977. 388-91. ---. Capital. 3 vols. 1867. Vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Vintage, 1977.
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977.