Page 102 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

90 COLIN SPARKS

was the relationship between a particular ‘ideological discourse’ and social
class: this latter relationship is in fact as resultant achieved by specific
features of the discursive practice itself.
It is obvious that despite considerable similarities in terms of the analysis
of the nature of society, and the stress upon the internal structure of
ideology, there is a different emphasis to Laclau’s theory ideology
compared with Althusser’s. In Althusser, ideology was, essentially, uniform
and without history. There are in Laclau a variety of ideologies: feudal,
bourgeois, fascist, imperialist, populist, and so on. We are dealing with a
much more limited notion of ideology, and one which need not be
considered to be working simply at the level of the unconscious.
There remains, however, an important direct debt to Althusser in this
theory of ideology in that Laclau argues that the primary mechanism by
which ideologies establish their relationship with the rest of the social
formation is through their ability to ‘interpellate’ concrete social forces:
‘what constitutes the unifyng principle of an ideological discourse is the
“subject” interpellated and thus constituted through this discourse’ (Laclau,
1979:101). An ideological discourse belongs to a particular part of the
social formation to the extent that it succeeds in naming, and thus
‘capturing the attention of’, a particular social force.
In practice, according to Laclau, the subjects so interpellated are never
social classes. In his account, social class is an economic abstraction which
does not exist in any concrete social reality. ‘Bourgeois’ and
‘proletarian’ are theoretical abstractions appropriate to the analysis of a
social formation. They find no concrete living representatives in the real
world of human beings. It is in this world that actual political struggles are
conducted. The real-world forces which constitute the elements in social
struggles are ‘the people’ and ‘the power bloc’.
These formulations provided four valuable ways of negotiating an exit
from the dilemmas of Althusserian marxism. In the first place, by loosening
the definition of ideology, the new framework permitted both the plurality
and historicity of ideologies. The task of enquiry was therefore no longer
the impossible one of demonstrating how an abstract and universal
ideology was equally present in all forms of cultural life but of exploring the
concrete forms and contents of different ideologies.
It was thus possible properly to integrate a reading of Gramsci into the
account of ideology. Although Althusser had signalled an interest in
Gramsci as someone who had addressed the question of ideology, there
was a range of problems preventing any full assimilation of the latter’s ideas
in Althusser’s system. The most important of these in this context is
Gramsci’s constant stress upon the shifting and provisional nature of the
hegemonic order, and the way in which hegemony could be won and lost,
which sits ill with a notion of a single pervasive ideology which operates in
and throughout all societies. In Althusser’s formulations, ‘ideological