Page 51 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

THE PROBLEM OF IDEOLOGY: MARXISM WITHOUT GUARANTEES 39

process in thought. These enable us to represent to ourselves and to others
how the system works, why it functions as it does.
The same process—capitalist production and exchange—can be
expressed within a different ideological framework, by the use of different
‘systems of representation’. There is the discourse of ‘the market’, the
discourse of ‘production’, the discourse of ‘the circuits’: each produces a
different definition of the system. Each also locates us differently—
as worker, capitalist, wage worker, wage slave, producer, consumer, etc.
Each thus situates us as social actors or as a member of a social group in a
particular relation to the process and prescribes certain social identities for
us. The ideological categories in use, in other words, position us in relation
to the account of the process as depicted in the discourse. The worker who
relates to his or her condition of existence in the capitalist process as
‘consumer’—who enters the system, so to speak, through that gateway—
participates in the process by way of a different practice from those who
are inscribed in the system as ‘skilled labourer’—or not inscribed in it at
all, as ‘housewife’. All these inscriptions have effects which are real. They
make a material difference, since how we act in certain situations depends
on what our definitions of the situation are.
I believe that a similar kind of ‘re-reading’ can be made in relation to
another set of propositions about ideology which has in recent years been
vigorously contested: namely, the class-determination of ideas and the
direct correspondences between ‘ruling ideas’ and ‘ruling classes’. Laclau
(1977) has demonstrated definitively the untenable nature of the
proposition that classes, as such, are the subjects of fixed and ascribed class
ideologies. He has also dismantled the proposition that particular ideas and
concepts ‘belong’ exclusively to one particular class. He demonstrates, with
considerable effect, the failure of any social formation to correspond to this
picture of ascribed class ideologies. He argues cogently why the notion of
particular ideas being fixed permanently to a particular class is antithetical
to what we now know about the very nature of language and discourse.
Ideas and concepts do not occur, in language or thought, in that single,
isolated, way with their content and reference irremovably fixed. Language
in its widest sense is the vehicle of practical reasoning, calculation and
consciousness, because of the ways by which certain meanings and
references have been historically secured. But its cogency depends on the
‘logics’ which connect one proposition to another in a chain of connected
meanings; where the social connotations and historical meaning are
condensed and reverberate off one another. Moreover, these chains are
never permanently secured, either in their internal systems of meanings, or
in terms of the social classes and groups to which they ‘belong’. Otherwise,
the notion of ideological struggle and the transformations of consciousness
—questions central to the politics of any marxist project—would be an
empty sham, the dance of dead rhetorical figures.