Today we made it half way through Kavenaugh’s “Ideology.” I wanted to take this opportunity to note some of the key points of our discussion:

1. Ideology in popular use is typically a pejorative term we throw at people who adhere to a rigid political platform. Having “ideology” means one lacks, or discounts, “common sense” that those of us who don’t “have” ideology use to solve real world problems.
2. Ideology in academic writing and discussion (i.e. in our discourse) is more technical– it refers to a “rich system of representations… which helps form individuals into social subjects who ‘freely’ internalize an appropriate ‘picture’ of their social world and their place in it.”
3. We discussed the influential history of Marxist thought to this. No, not anti-American communist thought, but ways Marx helped found modern sociology and ideological analysis that is still very influential to most social sciences and humanities (and even some biologists, like Richard Lewontin).
4. For Marx, an unequal and unjust society (where some feast while many starve) is the product of the ruling class (capitalists, in our case) dominates the subordinate working class (laborers and the poor). These two classes are in conflict, and if they really did go all-out in that conflict, the means of production wouldn’t be reproduced and the whole thing would come apart. But that doesn’t happen. Instead we reproduce the society, even though it is marked by inequity.
5. Getting people to comply via force would be one way to do this, but that is expensive and draws attention to the fact that there’s something wrong in the first place. Even some of the dominant class will think this is a bad idea. Think of images from the civil rights movement of the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Where peaceful protesters stood up to racial oppression, dogs and fire-hoses and truncheons were used to put down the protests. But this overt, bloody oppression made even some white folks (who benefitted from white supremacist Jim Crow law) openly question the fairness of segregation. This multiracial, multiclass coalition ended Jim Crow.
6. More efficient than force, and far more effective, is ideology. We “freely” accept the way of the world pretty much as the best available option for ourselves as individuals and societies, and thus the status quo (warts and all) tends to stay the same. Some of us might get rich, or defy dominant culture, but most of us go pleasantly along, even if we get the short end of the societal stick. “Little boxes, made of ticky tacky…”

Tomorrow we’ll take this discussion to the next level, discussing how our understanding of ideology can empower our analysis of cultural texts. William Cronon, like Nöel Sturgeon, offers us a great example of what this kind of scholarship looks like. We’ll read how the discourses of “wilderness preservation” may appear quite “excorporative” or subversive, but may actually reflect, or even support the larger industrial, resource-hungry capitalism.

Happy reading!

Shane