Page 55 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

THE PROBLEM OF IDEOLOGY: MARXISM WITHOUT GUARANTEES 43

ideological struggle most frequently took place. ‘Common sense’ became
one of the stakes over which ideological struggle is conducted. Ultimately,
‘The relation between common sense and the upper level of philosophy is
assured by “politics”…’ (331).
Ideas only become effective if they do, in the end, connect with a
particular constellation of social forces. In that sense, ideological struggle is
a part of the general social struggle for mastery and leadership—in short
for hegemony. But ‘hegemony’ in Gramsci’s sense requires, not the simple
escalation of a whole class to power, with its fully formed ‘philosophy’,
but the process by which a historical bloc of social forces is constructed
and the ascendancy of that bloc secured. So the way we conceptualize the
relationship between ‘ruling ideas’ and ‘ruling classes’ is best thought in
terms of the processes of ‘hegemonic domination’.
On the other hand, to abandon the question or problem of ‘rule’—of
hegemony, domination and authority—because the ways in which it was
originally posed are unsatisfactory is to cast the baby out with the bath-
water. Ruling ideas are not guaranteed their dominance by their already
given coupling with ruling classes. Rather, the effective coupling of
dominant ideas to the historical bloc which has acquired hegemonic power
in a particular period is what the process of ideological struggle is intended
to secure. It is the object of the exercise, not the playing out of an already
written and concluded script.
It will be clear that, although the argument has been conducted in
connection with the problem of ideology, it has much wider ramifications
for the development of marxist theory as a whole. The general question at
issue is a particular conception of ‘theory’: theory as the working out of a
set of guarantees. What is also at issue is a particular definition of
‘determination’. It is clear from the ‘reading’ I offered earlier that the
economic aspect of capitalist production processes has real limiting and
constraining effects (i.e. determinancy), for the categories in which the
circuits of production are thought, ideologically, and vice versa. The
economic provides the repertoire of categories which will be used, in
thought. What the economic cannot do is (a) to provide the contents of the
particular thoughts of particular social classes or groups at any specific
time; or (b) to fix or guarantee for all time which ideas will be made use of
by which classes. The determinancy of the economic for the ideological can,
therefore, be only in terms of the former setting the limits for defining the
terrain of operations, establishing the ‘raw materials’, of thought. Material
circumstances are the net of constraints, the ‘conditions of existence’ for
practical thought and calculation about society.
This is a different conception of ‘determinancy’ from that which is
entailed by the normal sense of ‘economic determinism’, or by the
expressive totality way of conceiving the relations between the different
practices in a social formation. The relations between these different levels