Page 47 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

THE PROBLEM OF IDEOLOGY: MARXISM WITHOUT GUARANTEES 35

Now this circuit can be construed, ideologically, in different ways. This
is something which modern theorists of ideology insist on, as against the
vulgar conception of ideology as arising from a fixed and unalterable
relation between the economic relation and how it is ‘expressed’ or
represented in ideas. Modern theorists have tended to arrive at this break
with a simple notion of economic determinacy over ideology through their
borrowing from recent work on the nature of language and discourse.
Language is the medium par excellence through which things
are ‘represented’ in thought and thus the medium in which ideology is
generated and tranformed. But in language, the same social relation can be
differently represented and construed. And this is so, they would argue,
because language by its nature is not fixed in a one-to-one relation to its
referent but is ‘multi-referential’: it can construct different meanings
around what is apparently the same social relation or phenomenon.
It may or may not be the case, that, in the passage under discussion,
Marx is using a fixed, determinate and unalterable relationship between
market exchange and how it is appropriated in thought. But you will see
from what I have said that I do not believe this to be so. As I understand it,
‘the market’ means one thing in vulgar bourgeois political economy and the
spontaneous consciousness of practical bourgeois men, and quite another
thing in marxist economic analysis. So my argument would be that,
implicitly, Marx is saying that, in a world where markets exist and market
exchange dominates economic life, it would be distinctly odd if there were
no category allowing us to think, speak and act in relation to it. In that
sense, all economic categories—bourgeois or marxist—express existing
social relations. But I think it also follows from the argument that market
relations are not always represented by the same categories of thought.
There is no fixed and unalterable relation between what the market is,
and how it is construed within an ideological or explanatory framework.
We could even say that one of the purposes of Capital is precisely to
displace the discourse of bourgeois political economy—the discourse in
which the market is most usually and obviously understood—and to
replace it with another discourse, that of the market as it fits into the
marxist schema. If the point is not pressed too literally, therefore, the two
kinds of approaches to the understanding of ideology are not totally
contradictory.
What, then, about the ‘distortions’ of bourgeois political economy as an
ideology? One way of reading this is to think that, since Marx calls
bourgeois political economy ‘distorted’, it must be false. Thus those who
live their relation to economic life exclusively within its categories of
thought and experience are, by definition, in ‘false consciousness’. Again,
we must be on our guard here about arguments too easily won. For one
thing, Marx makes an important distinction between ‘vulgar’ versions of
political economy and more advanced versions, like that of Ricardo, which