I finished my first pass through Göran Therborn's The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology (1980) recently (this is a Nate recommendation, thank you Nate!) and what follows are some brief notes about the introduction to the (very short) book.
First, a few notes about the project and how Therborn posits it to the reader:
The main concern of this essay is the operation of ideology in the organization, maintenance, and transformation of power in society.
Ideology is not, Therborn argues, either consciousness or symbolic language; rather, partially extending Althusser's argument in "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," Therborn identifies ideological work (done by a text, a speech, etc.) as work that "operates in the formation and transformation of human subjectivity." This follows closely to one sense of the analysis of ideology in Marx (it is "the medium through which men make their history as conscious actors") and completely breaks with another (ideology as "false consciousness," false belief).
According to Therborn, Althusser got it right in some ways and wrong in others. (I think Althusser is repulsive as a person, just putting that out there.) What he got right: he conceptualized ideology in terms of the formation of human subjectivity, and, crucially, as a "social process of address, or 'interpellations,' inscribed in material social matrices." He got it wrong, as so many do, by trusting science a bit too much. Here's Therborn again:
In Althusser's view ideology represents an 'imaginary distortion of the real relations' of individuals to the relations of production, and to the relations that derive from them. This definition is related to two theses, both of which I find untenable: 1. that only scientific knowledge is 'true' or 'real' knowledge, all other forms of cognition... being distortions or forms of miscognition; 2. that human beings are (significantly) motivated as subjects only by what they know, by true or distorted knowledge.
Therborn asserts that we need to break with Althusser's "problematic" of science vs. ideology and the "rigid demarcation" separating them. So far so good. (There's also some stuff about the ideological constitution of classes that I will get to later on.) In a way, the porosity of the boundary separating scientific ways of knowing from all other ways is the entire point of this blog/newsletter. What I really want to highlight here is just a couple of things for further thought and elaboration.
First, ideology as "interpellating" human subjects, forming and transforming human subjectivity. I think this has happened in many discrete instances throughout the pandemic, and I also think the disorientation many of us are currently experiencing is related to this as well. My life is completely different in every way than it was in 2019: I am no longer in graduate school, I no longer have a clear sense of what I want to do, I am no longer partnered, I am no longer living in my house, and so on and so forth. But in many ways I feel like we are all stuck in a subjectivity corresponding to the "before." This is the sneaky working of ideology, I suspect. Neither I nor Therborn really buy the "material base/ideological superstructure" prominent in the Marxist tradition. Certain ideological positions and movements do seem intended to ratify the disastrous handling of the pandemic; others don't, but nevertheless seem to turn us facing backwards, as if we haven't been transformed by this experience.
I have fallen prey to this. I have made decisions -- big, important, consequential decisions -- based on the subjectivity of pre-pandemic "normal." And I have experienced the resulting dissonance as jarring spiritual dislocation. I don't really know what else to make of this; just putting it down in case the theme develops into something interesting later.
The other thing I want to flag is Therborn's critique of motivation-by-interest. (I think this corresponds somewhat to the "caloric deprivation theory of social change" referenced in Nate's work on moral economy.) Therborn calls this idea, the idea that people are motivated by their interests, whether real or "false," a "utilitarian residue in Marxism" that ought to be rejected on the basis that it
assumes that normative conceptions of what is good and bad and conceptions of what is possible and impossible are given in the reality of existence and are accessible only through true knowledge of the latter.
Therborn is smart to call this a "utilitarian residue." After all, utilitarianism is one of the conceptual foundations and justifications for market exchange, free markets, for a market-based economy generally, and it shows. We talk about market actors in terms of being motivated by their "interests," which they are often assumed to have perfect or at least good-enough information to determine; engaging in exchange to maximize their "utility," presumed (like "risk" in COVID discourse) to be a little angel number imprinted on your heart. One doesn't have to be a Marxist to know that this isn't actually how people behave (but it helps).
My hope is that this more thorough investigation of ideology, and Marxist theorizing about ideology, can help us make a little more sense of the pandemic. And avoid falling into silly traps like -- Republicans just don't believe science, people don't know what's good for them, if they did they'd behave differently. Much of the behavior around COVID that we are being instructed to view as irrational (false consciousness, or whatever) is actually so much richer, more interesting, and more informative about the actual ideological and psychic dimensions of the crisis.
Till next time!