Page 93 - Critical and Cultural Theory

SOCIAL IDENTITIES
definitions of ideology. The main ones are:

- a body of ideas, ideals, values or beliefs;
- a philosophy;
- a religion;
- false values used to keep people under control;
- a set of habits or rituals;
- the medium through which a culture shapes its world;
- ideas promoted by a specific social class, gender or racial
group;
- the values that sustain dominant structures of power;
- the process whereby a culture produces meanings and roles
for its subjects;
- the alliance of culture and language;
- the presentation of cultural constructs as natural facts.'

Thus, ideology can be defined both neutrally, as a set of ideas with
no overt political connotations, and critically, as a set of ideas
through which people fashion themselves and others within
specific socio-historical contexts, and through which the prosperity
of certain groups is promoted. The theories here examined lay
emphasis on the critical interpretation, which Paul de Man sums
.
up as follows: 'When they are .. being enlisted in the service of
collective patterns of interest ... fictions become ideologies' (de
Man 1990: 183). Fictions are not fixed and immutable entities, for
they are always open to ideological manipulation. In examining
fictions, therefore, there would be little point in searching for
stable forms of knowledge, since their messages vary according to
the ways in which ideology appropriates them. According to
Raymond Williams, this makes literature, in particular, a histori-
cally determined form of signification. Literature should not refer
to a universal and unchanging aesthetic realm, or canon of excel-
lence, but rather to a practice inextricable from the ideological
circumstances of its production (Williams 1977).
Ideology can use all sorts of strategies to legitimate itself. These
are not always explicitly political. In fact, some of ideology's most
successful ploys rely on concepts that may at first seem to have

'WThe issue of naturalization is explored in Part I, Chapter 4, 'Representation'
and in Part III, Chapter 2, 'The Aesthetic'.

76