Page 74 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

62 JORGE LARRAIN

prejudge their adequacy or truth. Criticism is either avoided or confined to
identifying the class or group character, the articulating principle (for
instance the bourgeois or Thatcherite nature) of an ideology. Ideology does
not inherently entail any necessary distortion.
If one accepts that a critical social science necessitates critical concepts
then the neutralization of ideology is a real loss. However, there are
different forms of neutralization. The leninist neutralization of ideology
within marxism, later adopted by Lukács and Gramsci, was carried out in
a context where the trust in reason, the acceptance of universal standards
and the belief in the possibility of reaching the truth were not challenged or
doubted. The contemporary attack on the critical notion of ideology
coming from post-structuralism and postmodernism has new and more
disturbing connotations which seriously put in doubt those principles.
Sabina Lovibond has understood very well this dimension of the problem
even if she still refers to false consciousness:

To reject ‘false consciousness’ is to take a large step towards
abandoning the politics of Enlightenment modernism. For it means
rejecting the view that personal autonomy is to be reached by way of
a progressive transcendence of earlier, less adequate cognitive
structures.
(Lovibond, 1989:26)
The postmodern critique of the critical concept of ideology goes far beyond
the scope and intention of the leninist neutralization of ideology within
marxism. It questions our ability to reach any truth which is not context-
relative, partial and localized; it doubts whether a true and total
understanding of social contradictions can ever be achieved and hence the
passing of judgement becomes impossible; it distrusts totalizing theories
which propound universal emancipation. ‘There is no reason, only
reasons’, Lyotard argues, or, what is the same, society is a series of
language games, each with its own rules and criteria of truth, each
incommensurable with one another (Van Reijen and Veerman, 1988: 278).
For such a conception, a negative concept of ideology which pretends to
know which are the contradictions in society and how they can be truly
solved, shares with other ‘meta-narratives’ a totalitarian character: they are
not only over-simplifications but also ‘terroristic’ in that they legitimate the
suppression of differences (Lyotard, 1984:82).
Nevertheless, it cannot escape the attention of an attentive reader of
Lyotard and Baudrillard that they end up re-introducing a universal, but
even more arbitrary, critical concept of ideology through the back door. In
their onslaught against meta-narratives and universalizing theories they feel
able to discriminate between those which fall and those which do not fall
into those categories, in order to dismiss the former as ideological and