Page 53 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

THE PROBLEM OF IDEOLOGY: MARXISM WITHOUT GUARANTEES 41

‘discursive’ operation. Powerful symbols and slogans of that kind, with a
powerfully positive political charge, do not swing about from side to side in
language or ideological representation alone. The expropriation of the
concept has to be contested through the development of a series of
polemics, through the conduct of particular forms of ideological struggle:
to detach one meaning of the concept from the domain of
public consciousness and supplant it within the logic of another political
discourse. Gramsci argued precisely that ideological struggle does not take
place by displacing one whole, integral, class-mode of thought with
another wholly-formed system of ideas:
What matters is the criticism to which such an ideological complex is
subjected by the first representatives of the new historical phase. This
criticism makes possible a process of differentiation and change in the
relative weight that the elements of the old ideological used to
possess. What was previously secondary and subordinate, or even
incidental, is now taken to be primary—becomes the nucleus of a new
ideological and theoretical complex. The old collective will dissolves
into its contradictory elements since the subordinate ones develop
socially, etc.
(Gramsci, 1971:195)

In short, his is a ‘war of position’ conception of ideological struggle. It also
means articulating the different conceptions of ‘democracy’ within a whole
chain of associated ideas. And it means articulating this process of
ideological de-construction and re-construction to a set of organized
political positions, and to a particular set of social forces. Ideologies do not
become effective as a material force because they emanate from the needs of
fully-formed social classes. But the reverse is also true—though it puts the
relationship between ideas and social forces the opposite way round. No
ideological conception can ever become materially effective unless and
until it can be articulated to the field of political and social forces and to
the struggles between different forces at stake.
Certainly, it is not necessarily a form of vulgar materialism to say that,
though we cannot ascribe ideas to class position in certain fixed
combinations, ideas do arise from and may reflect the material conditions
in which social groups and classes exist. In that sense—i.e. historically—
there may well be certain tendential alignments—between, say, those who
stand in a ‘corner shop’ relation to the processes of modern capitalist
development, and the fact that they may therefore be predisposed to
imagine that the whole advanced economy of capitalism can be
conceptualized in this ‘corner shop’ way. I think this is what Marx meant
in the Eighteenth Brumaire when he said that it was not necessary for people
actually to make their living as members of the old petty bourgeoisie for