Page 168 - Culture Society and Economy

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CONCLUSION

from the structure of reality itself. According to Marx, false consciousness
had a deep root, arising necessarily out of the actual complexity of the
relations of political economy themselves.
For this very reason, the effort required to force the secrets of reality into
the open was no mean feat. Deceptive appearances arising from spontaneous
forms of consciousness had to be overcome and hard, time-consuming and
difficult study was required to penetrate to these truths, the more so as now
there were no mystical theurgical formulae, no nomen barbarum to which
one could resort. Only hard and critical intellectual and political struggle
could yield useful results. Left to itself, the mechanisms of exploitation
would never reveal themselves spontaneously to popular consciousness.
This cunning of production and these deceptions of popular consciousness,
derived neither from a semiotic nor from a psychological source, as many
in cultural studies and postmodernism assert. ‘Multi-accentuation’ à la
Bakhtin is but a mechanism through which cunning sometimes operates,
not its source. They derived from reality and thus were ideologies, not just
‘discourses’ or ‘discursive formations’. It is apparent that what we have here
is a theory which posits that what is spontaneously reflected in popular con-
sciousness, moving and profound as it may be, is necessarily limited and
often deceptive and that the real truths of life are, for this very reason, never
spontaneously reflected but are concealed. Hence the crucial role of intel-
lectual (and political) agency and the critical contribution (or harm) which
such persons could make to human development.
But there is a further implication of Marx’s conception of the double
impact of reality. Since, as has been pointed out, reality is hidden, it
has to be forced into the open by intellectual analysis combined with
political struggle. But since false consciousness is anchored neither in
semiotics nor in ‘misunderstanding’ but in political economic reality,
intellectual exposure and critique by themselves do not alter the fact that
the system of exploitation continues to persist in reality. Therefore, even
the act of intellectually forcing open and exposing this hidden abode can-
not dispel the complex influence of the noisy sphere on popular con-
sciousness. After writing or reading Capital and accepting its critique,
capitalism continues to flourish, perhaps more powerfully than ever.
Human development has to be accomplished in reality and not just liter-
arily and it takes a great deal more than an intellectual or emotional act
of expressive culture to achieve this goal.
Thus, as is well known, to Marx, religious distress was the expression of
real material and personal distress. By itself, theoretical criticism exposing
religion as a form of false consciousness, no matter how penetrating
nor how forcefully, lucidly or eloquently expressed, whether in words or

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