7 Hegemony and Ideology

Dr. Rahul De

Introduction

In ordinary conversation, to claim that someone is speaking ideologically usually is meant to suggest that the person speaking has a skewed view of things distorted by a set of rigid pre- conceptions. From the perspective of critical theory, the concept of ideology has been developed, discussed and debated by multiple thinkers over the course of the last two centuries. The term ideology was originally coined at the end of the eighteenth century by the French philosopher Destutt de Trace and was meant to connote the science of the realm of ideas. Such a science would study the human mind and analyze human perception. Over the 19th century Karl Marx engaged consciously with the concept of ideology and transformed the concept to refer to the social determination of ideas by material conditions. Karl Marx’s conception of ideology was one of the most influential and over the 20th century a diverse set of thinkers engaged critiqued and modified Marx’s conception. There is however no consensus about what the concept of ideology means in contemporary critical discourses. This module will try to trace the development of the concept of ideology first from within the Marxist tradition through to the linguistic turn in the concept in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Karl Marx’s and the classical Marxist conceptualization of ideology

It is difficult to distill Marx’s concept of ideology because he transformed his ideas substantially throughout his life. Moreover, some of the ideas in Marx’s later works (Das Capital) contradict ideas in his earlier work (the German Ideology). In this section I will discuss some of the common themes that runs through Marx’s notion of ideology and which were borrowed by other classical Marxist thinkers like Lenin, Lukacs, Adorno etc. Marx crucial intervention in the conception of ideology was that he believed that ideas were determined by the material conditions under which they are produced. The idea that all men are equal in the eyes of the law seems obvious in modern times, but would be considered irrational in feudal society. Marx’s materialist conception of ideas was in deliberate contrast to the Hegelian notion that ideas determine reality. Marx inverted Hegel’s philosophy to propound a materialist theory of history, which postulates that the material conditions of a society determine social reality and human consciousness about this reality. Marx’s dedicated his life to understand the structure of capitalist society. His main thesis was that society is controlled by the class which controls the means of production. Hence, capitalist society is ruled by the capitalist class which dominates the sphere of production. He defined ideology as those ideas which helped buttress the rule of the dominated classes. Marx theorized that the structure of any society can be divided into two strata’s: The economic base which includes the goods and services produced by a society and the relationship men/women enter to produce these goods. The economic base is dominated by the class which controls the means of production. The superstructure is considered the realm of ideas and cultural intermediaries through which these ideas are transmitted. These include religious institutions, legal institutions, arts and literature, educational institutions etc. Marx believed that the role of the above super-structural forces was to legitimize the relations of domination existing in the base. In Feudal society, the feudal/ monarchial class controlled land and dominated the peasant class working in agricultural fields. Churches played a vital role in feudal society to legitimize the power of the feudal/monarchial class. In capitalist society the capitalist class control factories and means of production and dominate the working class. The state, constitution and legal apparatus legitimized the domination and control of the capitalist class.

Marx notion of ideology implies a degree of mystification or what Marx commonly referred to as false consciousness. For Marx ideology acted as a screen to mask the conditions of reality, to deceive the dominated classes about their conditions of existence. This model depends on a distinction between appearances which are ideologically constructed and ‘reality’ which refers to the state of affairs as they are. Thus, according to Marx, the wage contract for workers were ideologically constructed to be an equal exchange of money for labor, even though Marx shows in detail how capitalists’ use the wage contract to exploit and siphon of surplus produced by workers. Similarly, Marx conceptualized the notion of commodity fetishism to indicate the ideological construction of commodities in capitalist societies. That is men/women mistake their relationship with people as a relationship between things. For example when a person desires and buys a commodity like a car or television, he/she fails to recognize the different processes of labor like production, designing, advertising and branding involved in production of the particular shoe. The buyer mistakes the ownership of other people’s labor as ownership of the commodity.

Marx conceptualization of ideology posed two problems. Firstly, it is difficult to explain how the dominating class (and thinkers like Marx himself) viewed ‘reality’ as it exists, while the dominated classes were duped into a state of false consciousness? Ideology suggested a degree of mystification of facts, but it didn’t explain how some subjects were capable of avoiding this mystification. Other thinkers challenged Marx’s bi-furcation of social reality into the realm of material objects and relationships (economic base) and ideas (superstructure). Moreover, they challenged the notion that the superstructure is determined by the base. It was pointed out that ideas are equally capable of determining material conditions of society. For example the discovery that led to the conversion of steam into energy led to the creation of railways and industries and ushered in the birth of industrial capitalist society. Critiques of Marx postulated that both the economic base and superstructure were capable of determining each other and one can’t be privileged over the other. In the next three sections we will explore how the Marxist concept of ideology was transformed to address the critiques raised against Marx.

Antonio Gramsci’s re-conceptualization of ideology as hegemony

Gramsci’s theory of ideology is subsumed for him under the more encompassing category of hegemony. Gramsci challenged the materialist interpretation of ideology and also contested the conceptualization of ideology as a permanent structural part of capitalistic society. Instead he believed that politics and ideology were a reflection of tendencies of development in the structure of society. Gramsci re-conceptualized ideology as hegemony to anticipate some of the critiques against the classical Marxist theory of ideology. He did not believe that any class could consciously control ideology, instead he pointed out that people in power can make mistakes in calculation and errors in judgment such that their political acts might not have the ideological effects that were intended. Ideology cannot be consciously engineered and propagated by the dominant class, as it is influenced by other social and political tendencies within society.

Gramsci’s reflection on the classical Marxist concept of ideology led him to ask the following question: what ensures that dominated classes accept the ideological construction of the dominant classes? He did not believe that the marginalized classes were passive minds who could be duped or coerced into accepting the domination imposed upon them. Gramsci defined cultural hegemony as political processes’ through which ideas which justify the existence of the dominant class are indoctrinated into the dominated classes. He attempted to identify both the processes through which cultural hegemony is constructed and the institutions through which these processes function. While he studied the politics of fascist Italy in the early 20th century, his ideas are extendable to understand the political development and tendencies within any capitalist society. Gramsci’s concept of hegemony was however not one sided, he argued that hegemony provides a terrain upon which different ideologies battle for control. Therefore, he argued that subordinate classes could resist and subvert the ideas of the ruling class, and transform the political order of society. Hegemony, unlike the concept of ideology, was not a fixed or rigid category instead any group or class could in theory gain hegemonic control over society at a certain time. Gramsci’s writing on hegemony also reflects upon the institutions which function as cultural intermediaries through which hegemony is secured. Gramsci conjectured that there are two spheres of activity in modern capitalist society: political society which includes the political apparatus of society and includes the government, executive, judiciary, courts, police and military and civil society which includes non-state public bodies like political parties, trade unions, religious institutions, educational institutions, cultural institutions and the mass-media. Ideas and beliefs were shaped and contested in the realm of civil society, as these institutions were part of the day to day lives of the masses. Gramsci wrote at length about how bourgeois ideas and values are indoctrinated through the public schooling system itself. He is considered one of the intellectual founders of cultural studies because his writings anticipated a need for studying popular culture in a theoretically rigorous manner in order to understand the political developments within society. He closely studied popular forms of literature like the serialized novel, opera music, art and newspapers. He wrote extensively on how the public school system should be changed to create a new class of organic intellectuals who will be in a position to resist bourgeois cultural hegemonic processes and develop working class cultures.

Louis Althusser’s conceptualization of ideology and ideological State Apparatuses (ISA):

Louis Althusser was a French philosopher considered to be one of the founders of the French structural Marxist school. A substantial number of Althusser’s works focus on reinterpreting and contesting some of the critiques levelled against Marx. Althusser rejected the claim that Marx was an historical and economic determinist, and instead argued that Marx’s later works conceptualized social reality as ‘over-determined’. This term is meant to connote that social reality is complicated and any change in society can be caused by a multiplicity of factors. He rejected the postulate that Marx theorized that social change is determined by the economic base. His re-working of Marx led him to re-conceptualize the Marxist notion of ideology. Althusser agreed with Marx breaking up of the social whole into the economic base and the superstructure, and he extended the division by postulating that the superstructure consists of two levels namely the politico-legal (law and the State) and the realm of ideologies. However, he didn’t believe that any one of these divisions determined the other. He conjectured that the role of the state is to reproduce the conditions of existence of the domination of society by a certain class. Borrowing a page from Gramsci, Althusser theorized that the state uses both means of repression as well as persuasion to reproduce the conditions of domination. The state ideologically influences society through ‘Ideological state apparatuses’ which include: the religious ISA (system of different churches), the educational ISA, the family ISA, the legal ISA, political parties, trade unions and the communication ISA (press, radio and television). The ISA’s function both through ideology as well as repression. For example schools indoctrinate students to submit to the rules of an established order both through class room lessons and activities and with the aid of disciplining devices. The same can be extended to churches and families. However, these ISA’s are not necessarily controlled by one class instead they can become a site of class struggle, and can become conduits of resistance for the dominated classes.

Althusser further develops the Marxist conception of ideology, by reflecting upon the processes through which ideology functions. He is not interested in studying how ideology constructs a distorted picture of social reality, but instead wants to understand how ideology influences people and gets inserted into their day-day lives. Althusser conjectures that ideology has a material existence and is not restricted to a separate realm of ideas. Consequently, to study ideology one shouldn’t focus on a persons’ thought but instead their actions. For Althusser a person’s capacity for perceiving one’s own identity cannot be taken for granted. Rather, it is acquired within the structure of established social practices which impose on individuals the role of a subject. He believed that a person’s desires, choices, preferences, judgments, intentions, and so forth are the products of social practices and are not something that they are born with. The ISA apparatus works through multiple social practices and rituals through which these practices are inscribed into the daily lives of people. This could include a mass in a small church, a minor match at a sports club or reading the local paper. Ideology itself works by interpellation or hailing concrete individuals as subjects. Interpellation refers to the process by which ideology, embodied in ISA’s, constitute the nature of an individual identity. It is the process through which we encounter our cultural values and internalize it. When a child enters school and becomes a student, he/she must perform the practices expected of a ‘good’ student such as be disciplined and attentive in class, work hard and strive to do well, be subservient to his/her teachers, participate in various social practices such as playing, singing in the school choir etc. From the students perspective he performs the role expected of a student because he/she wants to do well, but from the perspective of ideology the values attached to be a ‘good’ student is naturalized through the various social practices inscribed within rituals in which the student participates within the educational ISA.

The linguistic turn in conceptualizing ideology as discourse

The classical Marxists’ focused on the nature of ideology and its function in capitalist society. Both Gramsci’s and Althusser’s interventions in the development of the concept of ideology, reflected on the processes through which ideology is constructed, disseminated and resisted in society. There is a third way of conceptualizing ideology which belongs to the linguistic revolution of the twentieth century. There have been many thinkers from diverse philosophical positions who have contributed to this tradition which include V.N. Voroshilov, Michel Pecheux, Paul de Man and Roland Barthes amongst others. This tradition believes that ideology does not have an autonomous existence within the realm of ideas in society and instead is constituted by the language of a society. They regard ideology as a discursive or semiotic phenomenon and focus on studying ideology through cultural texts. The concept of a text within the discursive approach of studying ideology is a meaningful structure composed of signs. The meaning of the text is governed by the choice and combination of signs used within it. Meaning itself is created by the reader of the text, who has to decode the combination of signs used to compose the text. A text typically has a material existence, but is not necessarily simply a written text instead it could be an image, a song, a video or an advertisement. Such a view conceives ideology less as a particular set of discourses than as a particular set of effects within discourse. Ideology affects discourses by both making certain meanings stick around a certain sign and by closing of other meanings that this sign could insinuate. Since groups with divergent social interests share the same language, they compete amongst each other to determine the meaning that a sign connotes. A sickle could symbolize prosperity for the feudal class and symbolize revolution for the working class. Signs are appropriated by different ideological positions to have different meanings. Ideological discourses function by naturalizing the meanings around a set of signs, hence the speaker misrecognizes themselves as the authors of the discourse, while in actuality the discourse determines the speech of the speaker. Ideology as discourse functions as a way of legitimating certain social interests. However unlike the classical Marxist conception of ideology, it does not mean that any subject can consciously forge an ideological position around a set of signs. Instead, the meaning of a sign is contested amongst agents from diverse social interest groups. One of the strengths of the linguistic tradition of conceptualizing ideology is that it has developed a rigorous basis of studying ideology in society through cultural texts. This was something crucially missing from the Marxist tradition of conceptualizing ideology.

I will demonstrate how the discursive approach studies ideology within cultural texts by studying life insurance advertisements as a cultural text. I will identify the signs that are used to compose the text and de-code the ideological meanings that are signified by these signs. I will focus on advertisements (videos provided in links for further reading section) by three different financial companies namely SBI life insurance ‘zindagi haske bitayenge’ campaign, HDFC life insurance ‘sar uthake jiyo’ campaign (A/V 1) and Max New York life insurance campaign. All of the above advertisement campaigns attempt to convince the viewer of the benefit of buying insurance, and borrow a set of signs easily recognizable by the viewer to make the campaign relatable. Further these campaigns create certain ideological meanings around these signs in order to equate the value of the insurance to other values that the viewer should ‘desire’. All these advertisement address the earning male member of the household as the ones expected to purchase these insurances. The male is constructed to be a working, family man whose main social role is to care for the welfare and future of their family. Consequently, men who are unemployed or do not have a family and women are not expected to be responsible for the family’s future. This discourse normalizes the role of the working male as the care-taker of the family, while foreclosing the possibility that this role could be played by other members. The SBI and HDFC ad makes the father the protagonist of the advertisement, by framing the father with their son/daughter; it normalizes the role of the father as one who must care for their children. Sometimes advertisements can implicate the social role of the father by showing the anxieties and uncertainties surrounding the household if the male is not there. In the Max New York life insurance ad, the women protagonist searches the house in an anxious manner looking for her husband and only feels relief when she finds her husband sleeping in the balcony. While the advertisement addresses the adult female of the household, it constructs the male as the main caretaker of the house, and ‘insurance’ as a means of alleviating the anxieties related to the loss of the caretaker. Secondly these advertisements construct the males’ social role as one of fulfilling the desires of the children of the household by reducing economic uncertainty in their future. Both SBI life insurance advertisements have the children addressing the father about the uncertainty of losing one’s own father. While the girl child says that she would not get married if her father died, the boy child says that he will give up his education to get a job to support his family. The father reassures the children by saying that even if he dies he will not let it affect the future of his children. The insurance is associated with not only handling uncertainties of death but also of ensuring that children can be allowed to have a happy future. However, this advertisement also suggests that the best future for the girl child would be marriage, while for the boy child it should be education. Here the meanings around the signs of the children are foreclosed to suggest fairly conventional gender roles of the male as the earner and the women as the caretaker of the family. The life insurance advertisements are constructed with the male/father/head of the family, women/wife and children as signs, however the meaning associated with these signs are fixed by the text. These advertisements also associate the insurance with certain values that the male is expected to desire, which is to raise one’s family without uncertainty, fulfill their family’s needs and aspirations and gain respect in life. The tagline for the HDFC advertisements is ‘Sar Uthake jiyo’ (live with your head held high) and the tagline of the SBI ad is ‘zindagi haske bitayenge’ (live your life with a smile). Both campaigns construct living a happy, respectable life without uncertainties as the values to be aspired for by the male earning member of the family. It also implicates that the failure of the male to fulfill this role will be conflated with their failure to be a ‘good’ head of the household. The male can however fulfill these constructed social roles by purchasing the life insurance. The advertisement functions by first associating a series of values with the social performance of the role of the father, and then conflating these values with the insurance. The viewer will de-code this advertisement to mean that a ‘good father’ will purchase insurance to secure the future of their family.

I have demonstrated how texts are composed by creating rigid meaning around certain signs. The ideological constructions around these advertisements can be gauged by contextualizing the representations and signs used in the above texts. These advertisements construct a normative representation of working class life. These advertisements construct the “working class man” as being healthy, hetero-normative, able to generate a stable income, and being family oriented. The primary ideological construction in these advertisements is to create a certain normative representation of the working class man and then equate these qualities with the life insurance. A working class man can perform the norm constructed through the advertisements only by purchasing life insurance.

INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN

	Karl Marx	Antonio Gramsci	Louis Althusser	Discursive tradition
Concept of Ideology	False Consciousness: screen to mask the condition of reality.	Hegemony: realm in which ideology is constructed and contested.	Has a material existence. Ideology is interpellated by social practices.	Semiotic phenomenon. Certain meaning stick around certain signs.
Division of society	Base and Superstructure	Political and Civil society	Base and Superstructure
Medium of ideological dissemination		Civil society	Ideological State Apparatuses	Cultural texts

AUDIO-VISUAL QUADRANT (MULTIMEDIA LINKS)

1) HDFC life insurance advertisement

2) Advertisement for retirement financial plans

3) Advertisement for Health product

REFERENCES:

• Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Ideology. Ed. Eagleton, Terry. UK: Longman Group UK Limited, 1994. 87-112. Print.
• Eagleton, Terry. Ideology: An Introduction. New York: Verso, 1991.Print
• Forgacs, David, ed. A Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988. Print.
• Marx and Engel. “Selected texts.” Ideology. Ed. Eagleton, Terry. UK: Longman Group UK Limited, 1994. 23-31. Print.
• Link for SBI life insurance advertisement with girl child: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRW_G3J1V44&list=UU_RzYoqxB_0mEjEr- VgcUrA
• Link for SBI life insurance advertisement with boy child: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E31u0OH80cU&list=UU_RzYoqxB_0mEjEr- VgcUrA
• Link for HDFC “SarUthakeJiyo” advertising campaign: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUlBOqtL0z4
• Link for Max New York life insurance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4YxX3XpmPQ