Page 94 - Critical and Cultural Theory

IDEOLOGY
little to do with politics. One such concept, according to Terry
Eagleton, is the aesthetic. The aesthetic has time and again been
harnessed to ideological imperatives. It has been used to show that
people can be brought together into one happy family - a harmo-
nious realm of shared feelings - to efface the stark reality of 'the
market place' and lack of 'ideological consensus' in 'actual social
relations' (Eagleton 1990: 38). The social body is dominated by
selfish drives. If ideology is to impose itself as a unified system of
values, it must devise ways of effacing this unsavoury state of
affairs. Thus, it relies on the aesthetic as a means of enlisting indi-
vidual experiences to a collective paradigm of 'sentiments' and
'affections' (Eagleton 1990: 23) and hence producing a sense of
community. The aesthetic, far from opposing or escaping
ideology, could be said to embody it.
At the basis of most Marxist theory rests the belief that all
cultural products (commodities, texts, works of art) are the resut
of social and material practices, related to other social practices,
within the field of history as a dialectical process. History is
animated by class conflict and all intellectual production bears the
traces of material struggles: both reading and writing are inscribed
in a struggle over meaning and hence in relations of power and
knowledge. Marx and Engels argue that all forms of social, politi-
cal and intellectual life are determined by a culture's economic
base: this consists of the mode of production characteristic of a
certain society (e.g. ancient, feudal, capitalist) and of forces and
relations of production (the power structures determined by who
owns the means of production). Social change may only be
effected by modifying the base. Ideology and institutions, for their
part, belong to the superstructure of society and serve to ratify the
material interests of the dominant classes.
Art is ultimately - though not exclusively - determined by
economic factors. However, the link between artistic production
and economic structures is not always obvious. Why, asks Marx,
do we still enjoy ancient Greek art although it is based on an
obsolete mode of production (Marx 1973)? According to the art
historian Max Raphael, such a question can only be addressed by
considering what could possibly have made Greek art relevant to
later cultures and their own modes of production. Thus, it is not
enough to look at how a particular economy determines its arte-
facts. It is also necessary to reflect on how such artefacts are

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