Page 119 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

IDEOLOGY

social relations of inequality within the sphere of signification and
discourse.
Ideology as a theoretical concept comes from Marxism. In classic
Marxism, the forms, contents and purposes of knowledge, representa-
tions and consciousness are not understood as abstracted from the
material and social activities of production and class antagonism. On
the contrary, the activity of production gives rise directly to
knowledge of nature, and this knowledge of nature is directed towards
further and increasing production by bringing all its myriad aspects as
closely into line with general natural ‘laws’ as possible.
It is Marx’s contention that knowledge of society arises in the same
way – directly from class antagonism. But whereas knowledge of
nature may be (at least in principle) of benefit to all classes, knowledge
of society is produced and reproduced in the interests of those who are
for the time being in a position of social supremacy (the ruling class).
Thus, for Marx, knowledge of society differs from knowledge of
nature by representing as natural those social arrangements that are in
fact historically contingent. This is the starting point for a theory of
ideology. The fundamental premises on which the Marxist concept of
ideology is based are expressed in two of Marx’s most celebrated
contentions:

The mode of production of material life conditions the social,
political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the
consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the
contrary, their social being that determines their conscious-
ness.

The individuals composing the ruling class possess among
other things consciousness, and therefore think. In so far
therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and
compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its
whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers,
as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and
distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the
ruling ideas of the epoch.

(Marx, 1977: 176, 389)
If the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas of an epoch, then
‘bourgeois ideology’, for instance, should not be understood simply as

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