Page 38 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

26 STUART HALL

frameworks—the languages, the concepts, categories, imagery of thought,
and the systems of representation—which different classes and social
groups deploy in order to make sense of, define, figure out and render
intelligible the way society works.
The problem of ideology, therefore, concerns the ways in which ideas of
different kinds grip the minds of masses, and thereby become a ‘material
force’. In this, more politicized, perspective, the theory of ideology helps us
to analyse how a particular set of ideas comes to dominate the social
thinking of a historical bloc, in Gramsci’s sense; and, thus, helps to unite
such a bloc from the inside, and maintain its dominance and leadership
over society as a whole. It has especially to do with the concepts and the
languages of practical thought which stabilize a particular form of power
and domination; or which reconcile and accommodate the mass of the
people to their subordinate place in the social formation. It has also to do
with the processes by which new forms of consciousness, new conceptions
of the world, arise, which move the masses of the people into historical
action against the prevailing system. These questions are at stake in a range
of social struggles. It is to explain them, in order that we may better
comprehend and master the terrain of ideological struggle, that we need
not only a theory but a theory adequate to the complexities of what we are
trying to explain.
No such theory exists, fully prepackaged, in Marx and Engels’ works.
Marx developed no general explanation of how social ideas worked,
comparable to his historico-theoretical work on the economic forms and
relations of the capitalist mode of production. His remarks in this area
were never intended to have a ‘law-like’ status. And, mistaking them for
statements of that more fully theorized kind may well be where the problem
of ideology for marxism first began. In fact, his theorizing on this subject
was much more ad hoc. There are consequently severe fluctuations in
Marx’s usage of the term. In our time—as you will see in the definition I
offered above—the term ‘ideology’ has come to have a wider, more
descriptive, less systematic reference, than it did in the classical marxist
texts. We now use it to refer to all organized forms of social thinking. This
leaves open the degree and nature of its ‘distortions’. It certainly refers to
the domain of practical thinking and reasoning (the form, after all, in
which most ideas are likely to grip the minds of the masses and draw them
into action), rather than simply to well-elaborated and internally consistent
‘systems of thought’. We mean the practical as well as the theoretical
knowledges which enable people to ‘figure out’ society, and within whose
categories and discourses we ‘live out’ and ‘experience’ our objective
positioning in social relations.
Marx did, on many occasions, use the term ‘ideology’, practically, in this
way. So its usage with this meaning is in fact sanctioned by his work.