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Ideology and culture

2005; Routledge; Volume: 11; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13569310500395974

1469-9613

Roger Griffin,

Social and Cultural Dynamics

Abstract Finding a pragmatic exit from the semantic labyrinth surrounding ‘ideology’ and ‘culture’, this article considers the neutral connotations of ‘ideology’ as a formative, intrinsically paradoxical, constituent of culture, and argues that the heterogeneous, volatile, and contested nature of all ideologies when viewed through some postmodernist lenses is their hallmark only under the historically exceptional societal conditions of high modernity. It moves on to consider the virtues of several non-reductionist variants of Marxist theory that postulate a subtle dialectic between ideology's coercive and emancipatory functions, aspects that can be seen at work at the generative and experiential core of all human cultures, and not just capitalist ones. These reflections lead to a call for a dialectical, anthropologically informed approach to the interface between culture and ideology. It concludes on a speculative note by suggesting that analogies made between ideological self-replication in cultural processes and the genetic basis of evolution could be more than metaphorical should the infant science of ‘memetics’ prove to have an empirically sound base. Acknowledgement I would like to acknowledge the help of Paul Jackson, Alfred Schobert, Bo Stråth, Michael Freeden, Joe Yannielli, in making this article more coherent. Notes 1. Raymond Williams, Keywords (London: Fontana, 1976), p. 87. 2. Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (New York: Randon House, 1952). 3. Malcolm Hamilton, ‘The elements of the concept of ideology’, Political Studies, 35/1 (1987), p. 19. 4. Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979). See particularly Chapter 20, ‘Strange Loops, or Tangled Hierarchies. 5. ‘Imagining’ is a more recently constructed construct, one that achieved considerable vogue in political science research into the ideology of nationalism after the appearance in 1991 of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities which explored the ‘cultural roots’ of nationalism as an ideology. 6. In Carroll's poem it turns out that the Snark was actually a Boojum, reminiscent of the way ideology and culture keep morphing into each other. 7. Chris Barker, Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice (London: Sage, 2000), p. 5. 8. Hamilton, op. cit., Ref. 3, p. 38. 9. See Pierre Bourdieu (Ed. Randal Johnson), The Field of Cultural Production (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1994). 10. Kroeber and Clyde, op. cit., Ref. 2, p. 181. 11. Hamilton, op. cit., Ref. 3, p. 38. 12. Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 5. 13. Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 5. 14. For a plea for the application of this principle to the study of fascism see G. L. Mosse, The Fascist Revolution (New York: Howard Fertig, 1999), p. x. 15. Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘Back and beyond: reversing the cultural turn?’ American Historical Review, 107/5 (December 2002), pp. 1476–1499. 16. Suny, ‘Back and beyond: reversing the cultural turn?’ American Historical Review, 107/5 (December 2002)., p. 1489. 17. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 5, cited in Suny, ‘Back and beyond: reversing the cultural turn?’ American Historical Review, 107/5 (December 2002)., p. 1483. 18. Suny, ‘Back and beyond: reversing the cultural turn?’ American Historical Review, 107/5 (December 2002)., p. 1485. 19. Suny, ‘Back and beyond: reversing the cultural turn?’ American Historical Review, 107/5 (December 2002)., pp. 1494–5. 20. At a genetic level, it is DNA's capacity for imperfect replication that is now recognized by the life sciences as one of the keys to the history of evolution on Earth. 21. Cf. the concept of ideological morphology developed by Michael Freeden in Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 22. James Clifford and George Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), p. 19. 23. William H. Sewell Jr., ‘The Concept(s) of culture’, in E. Bonnell and L. Hunt (Eds), Beyond the Cultural Turn. New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 53–4. 24. Patrick Brantlinger, ‘A response to Beyond the Cultural Turn’, American Historical Review, 107/5 (December 2002), p. 1509. 25. Karl Jaspers first introduced this (inevitably contested) concept in The Origin and Goal of History tr. Michael Bullock (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953; first German edition 1949). It has been taken up by Arnold Gehlen and outside Germany as well: see the five volumes of Johann P. Arnason, S. N. Eisenstadt and Björn Wittrock (Eds), Axial Civilizations and World History (Leiden: Brill, 2005). On modernity's experience of ‘permanent liminality’ in contrast to premodern societies’ transitional phases of liminality see Arpad Szakolczai, Reflexive Historical Sociology (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 216–29. 26. Lewis Mumford, The Transformation of Man (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1956). 27. Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964; 1st edition, 3 vols. Munich, Zurich: Rhein-Verlag, 1931–1932), p. 480. 28. Broch, The Sleepwalkers (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964; 1st edition, 3 vols. Munich, Zurich: Rhein-Verlag, 1931–1932)., pp. 445–8. 29. Max Weber, ‘The meaning of “ethical neutrality”’, in E. Shils and H. Finch (Eds), Max Weber on the Methodology of the Social Sciences (Glecoe, IL: The Free Press, 1949), pp. 20–1. 30. A seminal work in this context is Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time (London: Verso: 1995). 31. G. L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses (New York: Howard Fertig, 1975). 32. Emilio Gentile, Le religioni della politica (Rome, Bari: Laterza, 2001). 33. Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, translated by Shaun Whiteside, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), p. 110. 34. It also should be noted that when placed in an international context, ‘culture’ is much more language-specific than ‘ideology’ in its usage: e.g. in Italian civiltà and cultura together cover the main connotations of English ‘culture’, whereas Kultur in German retains a considerable historical baggage that it does not have in English, and ‘civilisation’ in French often has positive cultural connotations of artistic and intellectual achievement that it lacks in English. See for example Alfed Meyer's appendices A and B to Kroeber and Kluckhorn, op. cit., Ref. 2, and the brief discussion of its relationship to the term civilization (pp. 11–3). 35. Geuss, op. cit., Ref. 12, pp. 12–22. 36. Letter from Engels to Franz Mehring, London, July 14, 1893, in (Lewis Feuer Ed.) Marx and Engels. Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy (London: Fontana, 1969), pp. 446–7. 37. E.g. Raymond Williams, ‘Base and superstructure in marxist cultural theory’, in Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980). 38. See particularly Lenin's essays ‘On co-operation’ and ‘better fewer, but better’, in Robert C. Tucker (Ed.), The Lenin Anthology (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1975), pp. 707–13. 39. An important exploration of these ambiguities is provided by Walter Adamson, Hegemony and Revolution: a Study of Antonio Gramsci's Political and Cultural Theory (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980). 40. The classic passage in which Gramsci rejects the traditional Marxist concept of ideology as ‘false consciousness’ is to be found in Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (Eds) (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), pp. 376–7. 41. John Adams, Letter to Hazekiah Niles, 15 February 1818, quoted in G. Seldes, The Great Thoughts (New York: Ballantine, 1985), p. 7. 42. Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and ideological state apparatuses: Notes towards an investigation’, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), p. 115. 43. Louis Althusser, Essays on Ideology (London, New York: Verso, 1971), pp. 54–5. 44. Althusser, op. cit., Ref. 42, pp. 52–3. 45. See particularly Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx (London: Routledge, 1994), Chapter 5, ‘Apparition of the inapparent, the phenomenal conjuring trick’, pp. 125–76. At one point (p. 152) Derrida alludes to the link between commodity fetishism in Marxist thought and the anthropological concept of ‘animism’ which endows all objects and material world with a spirit in some pre-capitalist societies, a theme well worth developing to establish the continuity between archetypal and modern aspects of human culture. 46. Cf. Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Matrix, or two sides of perversion’, Philosophy Today, 43 (1999). 47. Renate Holub, ‘Gramsci's theory of consciousness: between alienation, reification and Bloch's principle of hope’, Antonio Gramsci, Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 115–6. 48. Principally in Ernst Bloch, Die Erbschaft unserer Zeit (1935), translated as Heritage of Our Times (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990). 49. Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung (1955), translated as The Principle of Hope (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). 50. Cf. Douglas Kellner, ‘Ernst Bloch, utopia and ideology critique’, downloadable from his critical theory website (‘Illuminations’) at: http://www.uta.edu/english/dab/illuminations/kell1.html (25/10/04) 51. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University, 1976 (1st edition 1967). 52. Jacques Derrida, Glas: que reste-t-il du savoir absolu? (Paris: Denoel, 1981), English translation John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand Glas, (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1986). The title ‘Death-knell’ alludes not just to the end of the absolutist claims to knowledge typical of 19th century Western thought, but of Western ethnocentrism generally with respect to culture. 53. For an example of a non-European perspective on human existence which throws into relief the Eurocentrism of most academic literature on issues relating to culture, ideology, and creativity, see Amit Gowami, The Self-Aware Universe (London: Simon & Schuster, 1993). 54. See Roger Griffin, ‘The primacy of culture. The current growth (or manufacture) of consensus within Fascist studies’, Journal of Contemporary History, 37/1 (2002), pp. 21–43. 55. See Roger Griffin, ‘Withstanding the rush of time. The prescience of G. L. Mosse's anthropological approach to fascism’, in Stanley Payne (Ed.), What History Tells: George L. Mosse's Study of Modern Europe (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin, 2003). 56. See Emilio Gentile, ‘Fascism, totalitarianism and political religion: Definitions and critical reflections on the critiques of a theory’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 5/3 (Winter 2004). 57. E.g. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of Eternal Return (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971; 1st edition 1949). 58. E.g. Clifford Geertz, The Theatre State in Bali (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). 59. Again Mircea Eliade's works are pivotal here. For more on the concept ‘palingenesis’ see Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1993), Chapter 2. 60. E.g. William Sullivan, The Secret of the Incas Myth: Astronomy, and the War Against Time (New York: Crown Publishers, 1996). 61. E.g. D. Freidel, et al., Maya Cosmos (New York: William R. Morrow, 1993). 62. Victor and Edith Turner, ‘Religious celebrations’, in Victor and Edith Turner (Eds), Celebration. Studies in Festivity and Ritual (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982), pp. 211–2. 63. For an example of the application of this concept (first elaborated by G. Deleuze and F. Guattari) to cultural imperialism see José Rabasa, Inventing A-m e-r-i-c-a. Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993). 64. See Malcolm Quinn, The Swastika (London: Routledge, 1994). 65. An example of an anthropological work which has a bearing on Nazi ritual politics is Angela Hobart's Healing Performances of Bali: Between Darkness and Light. Community Well-being and the Religious Festival (Oxford: Berghahn, 2003). 66. For an experiment in this combination see Roger Griffin, ‘Notes towards the definition of fascist culture: the prospects for synergy between Marxist and liberal heuristics’, Renaissance and Modern Studies, 42 (Autumn 2001), pp. 95–115. 67. Triadic progression is central to Steiner's Theosophy. An introduction to supersensible world knowledge and the purpose of humanity (1904). 68. For the importance of the triad as a basic Gestalt in Hesse's work see Theodore Ziolkowski, The Novels of Hermann Hesse. A Study in Theme and Structure (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974). 69. See Matt Ridley, Nature via Nurture. Genes, Experience, and What Makes us Human (London: Fourth Estate, 2003). 70. See The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), Chapter 11. The prototype of the ‘meme’ concept was first proposed in Richard Semon, Die Mneme als erhaltendes Prinzip im Wechsel des organischen Geschehens [The mneme as the principle of conservation in the flux of organic life] (3rd edition Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1911), first published in 1904. 71. See particularly Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 72. See the section ‘The third evolutionary process: Memes and cultural evolution’, in Daniel Dennett (Ed.), Consciousness Explained (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991). 73. An allusion to a pioneering collection of essays crude refuting determinist models of the human: see Arthur Koestler and J. R. Smythies (Eds), Beyond Reductionism (London: Hutchinson Publishing Group, 1969). Other seminal works on this theme are Arthur Koestler, Ghost in the Machine (London: Hutchinson Publishing Group, 1967); and Karl R. Popper and John C. Eccles, The Self and Its Brain (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1977). 74. R. Joseph (Ed.), NeuroTheology. Brain, Science, Spirituality and Religious Experience (Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 2002). 75. Dean Hamer, The God Gene. How Faith is Hardwired into our Genes (New York: Doubleday, 2004). 76. Only ‘phenomenologically’, of course, since to step outside the force-fields of ideology and culture is impossible, and hence a fertile heuristic fiction, like the square root of minus 1 and other imaginary numbers. 77. Douglas Adam, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (London: Pan, 1980): see especially Chapter 17.