Page 49 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

THE PROBLEM OF IDEOLOGY: MARXISM WITHOUT GUARANTEES 37

thing); and what lies ‘hidden beneath’, and is embedded in the structure,
not lying about the surface. It is crucial to see, however—as the market
exchange/production example makes clear—that ‘surface’ and
‘phenomenal’ do not mean false or illusory, in the ordinary sense of the
words. The market is no more or less ‘real’ than other aspects—production
for example. In Marx’s terms production is only where, analytically, we
ought to start the analysis of the circuit: ‘the act through which the whole
process again runs its course’ (Marx, 1971). But production is not
independent of the circuit, since profits made and labour hired in the
market must flow back into production. So, ‘real’ expresses only some
theoretical primacy which marxist analysis gives to production. In any
other sense, market exchange is as much a real process materially, and an
absolutely ‘real’ requirement of the system—as any other part: they are all
‘moments of one process’ (Marx, 1971).
There is also a problem about ‘appearance’ and ‘surface’ as terms.
Appearances may connote something which is ‘false’: surface forms do not
seem to run as deep as ‘deep structures’. These linguistic connotations have
the unfortunate effect of making us rank the different moments in terms of
their being more/less real, more/less important. But from another
viewpoint, what is on the surface, what constantly appears, is what we are
always seeing, what we encounter daily, what we come to take for granted
as the obvious and manifest form of the process. It is not surprising, then,
that we come spontaneously to think of the capitalist system in terms of the
bits of it which constantly engage us, and which so manifestly announce
their presence. What chance does the extraction of ‘surplus labour’ have, as
a concept, as against the hard fact of wages in the pocket, savings in the
bank, pennies in the slot, money in the till. Even the nineteenth-century
economist, Nassau Senior, couldn’t actually put his hand on the hour in the
day when the worker worked for the surplus and not to replace his or her
own subsistence.
In a world saturated by money exchange, and everywhere mediated by
money, the ‘market’ experience is the most immediate, daily and universal
experience of the economic system for everyone. It is therefore not
surprising that we take the market for granted, do not question what
makes it possible, what it is founded or premissed on. It should not
surprise us if the mass of working people don’t possess the concepts with
which to cut into the process at another point, frame another set of
questions, and bring to the surface or reveal what the overwhelming
facticity of the market constantly renders invisible. It is clear why we
should generate, out of these fundamental categories for which we have
found everyday words, phrases and idiomatic expressions in practical
consciousness, the model of other social and political relations. After all,
they too belong to the same system and appear to work according to its
protocols. Thus we see, in the ‘free choice’ of the market, the material