Page 120 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

IDEOLOGY

what individual members of that class think, but as the prevailing ways
of making sense that are established throughout bourgeois society.
These ways of making sense may be produced and distributed not by
the ruling class directly, but by relatively autonomous and apparently
fragmented groups, ranging from intellectuals and teachers to media
professionals and hairdressers.
The contention that social being determines consciousness gives
rise to the Marxist notion of false consciousness. In the case of the ruling
class itself, false consciousness occurs when that class imagines that its
position in society is determined by the laws of God or nature – as in
the doctrine of the divine right of kings for feudal monarchs, or the
doctrine of individualism and the conception of society as a social
contract in bourgeois philosophy. False consciousness for subordinate
classes occurs when they make sense of their social and individual
circumstances in terms supplied by the prevailing ideology, rather than
in terms of their own class interests in opposition to the dominant
classes. In this context, ideology is seen as the production and
distribution of ideas in the interests of the ruling classes.
Thus ideology is the means by which ruling economic classes
generalise and extend their supremacy across the whole range of social
activity, and naturalise it in the process, so that their rule is accepted as
natural and inevitable; and therefore as legitimate and binding.
For Marx, not all knowledge of society is necessarily ideological. In
particular, the science of historical materialism (Marxism) itself could
not be seen as an ideology, given the notion of ideology as illusory
knowledge. The understanding gained in the struggle to change both
society and nature is partial and limited and can be mistaken but, for
Marxists, the objective existence of natural and historical laws is not
open to question; nor is the belief that materialist science provides the
means to make those laws known.
The concept of ideology has proved very influential in the study of
communication and culture. So much so, in fact, that it has become
somewhat over-extended in use. In particular, ideology has been
reduced to a mere reflection of the economic base in some popularised
versions of Marxism. As a result, ideology is often confined to the
superstructure, where it is defined in terms of ‘bodies’ of thought,
beliefs, ideas, etc., which reduces it from a conceptualisation of social
relations and practices to a set of empirical things.
Just as language is hard to analyse if you look at words rather than
the laws which produce words, so the reduction of ideology to ideas
does not explain their production or forms. The concept needed to be
re-theorised, and this led to the idea of ideology in general. This notion

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