Ideology: Signification from structure to poststructural

when ideology defines a struggle...

The signification of a message is commonly argued to have polysemic explanations thus, along with, duly establish the variety of human recipient or decoder in a geo-social format. Such heterogeneity can be classified through political, economic, and obviously other various cultural identity specifications. A decoder can thus be identified in accordance with his / her class identity, mundane individual identity and also group identity [like ethnic, religious...]. The natural heterogeneity can only be defined or identified by an eternal signifier what we may call ideology. Ideology is thus a much reductionist signifier representing a vast thought-structure that encompasses any temporal aspect of human life. Noted theorist Raymond Williams (1977) defined ideology in the following three categories:

(a) System of belief of a class or group;

(b) False consciousness or ideation of the ruling class which is opposed to the scientific and pragmatic knowledge;

(c) A process which produces ideas and meaning;

Psychologists’ views tell us about ideology as a useful tool to produce transparent attitude; they feel that society determines the existence of ideology than individuality. Classical Marxian theorists on the other hand think that ‘ideology’ of the oppressed class determines a political dimension of social relationship and thus produces constructive relationship being always affiliated to any mass identity. Later in many countries including third world nations, Marxian theorists have started even recognizing the ‘ideology of individuality’ to combat the commercial outburst of ‘individualism’ along with the traditional class-driven mass political ideology. Legendary Marxian theorist EMS Namboodiripad has beautifully explained the transformation of mass ideological format taking Chinese case of transforming the classical expression of ideology “Dictatorship of Proletariat”: “…China does not call its own system a Dictatorship of Proletariat, but a People’s Democratic Dictatorship…What does this change in terminology mean? It means, first, that the dictatorial element is preserved. Secondly, it is not the Dictatorship of Proletariat but the dictatorship of the entire people against a small stratum of the former ruling class”. It is however an evident truth that class inequalities and surplus extraction of divided labour therefore are the prime sources of ideology in a society altogether.

Raymond Williams however argues that dominant class squeezing the process and means of production creates a false ‘mythic’ consciousness in the name of ideology in the working class psyche. Using this illusive structure extensively they influence people and the mass consciousness. In this course they try to get a strong hold of mass media owning these organizations to transform common mass a mere tool of corporate propaganda.

EMS Namboodiripad here has been pragmatic to the core to explain the referent of ideology in socialism and socialist systemic ideology: the socio-political set-up established in the Soviet Union and socialist countries of Eastern Europe was called the “Dictatorship of Proletariat”. Experience with the working of that system has shown that though major achievements have been registered under it, the dictatorship of the proletariat as practiced in the Soviet Union and socialist countries of Eastern Europe had serious deficiencies. Marxists-Leninists throughout the world have now come to the conclusion that there is no going back to the system that existed in Soviet Union…”

Ideology and signification: 

It is already evident that in a specified social territory the appropriate signification of communication depends upon the social responsibility of cultural stance which ensures the meaning of the message. Such specification of culture determines the ideological stance of the communicator. If a dress-code signifies a specific meaning it can then also disseminate ideology of the communicator. However the concept of ideology is a staunch Marxist analytical phenomenon which has tended to have developed in socialist revolutionary movements and also in the pluralist discourse of the transformation of cultural elements. It is now important to note Fredric Jameson’s argument. ‘All class consciousness — or in other words, all ideology in the strongest sense, including the most exclusive forms of ruling class consciousness just as much as that of oppositional or oppressed classes — is in its very nature utopian’.

However ideology, as commonly observed, is the procurement of a system (semantic system) of ideas by a set of people on similar contextual planes which not only prepares the base of a social structure but also sustains plausible expression by which people can interact with each other and also with the institutions. Naturally contradiction and conflict are always the necessary outcomes of ideological existence of human being as it embeds both instinctive and professional courses of struggle within a social structure where people earn the necessary footage to work with or to live in. Thus in a capitalist socio-economic format, exploitation often causes severe contradiction between different ideological codes of general people and social institutions. Ideological practice has the natural heterogeneity in various micro-social formats, like marriage, service providing institutions, charitable institutions, shopping malls, religious groups, business organizations, professional sporting institutions, and even rock bands coexistent along with the political ideology. It is being graduated to be more complicated in the contemporary information processing age also. All the facets of the social structure have common fascination to produce dominant or elitist forms of culture separately, fabricators of which often called ‘elite’ and ‘opinion leader’, as we can observe information elite, elite rock band, elite or dominant religious groups and elite members of the civil society.

American Marxists like Fredric Jameson and others from Frankfurt school have tried to place ideology in a utopian environment where ideology is basically a false consciousness and often structured by the ideas of the dominant class. In this way they have discarded any possibility of ‘ideology of masses’ or the concept of political ideology. Noted Marxist Louis Althusser has defined ideology as it “... is a system of ideas and representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group...ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence... we commonly call religious ideology, ethical ideology, legal ideology, political ideology, etc., so many world outlooks. Of course, assuming that we do not live one of these ideologies as the truth (e.g. believe in god, duty, justice, etc....), we admit... that these ‘world outlooks’ are largely imaginary, i.e. do not correspond to reality. However, while admitting that they... constitute an illusion, we admit that they do not make allusion to reality, and that they need to be interpreted to discover the reality of the world behind their imaginary representation of the world (ideology = illusion / allusion)” (Althusser, 1994). 

Althusser however though has recognized the referent of beliefs as used to refer ideology the definition doesn’t still substantiate the concept of ideology as a structure which has got a structural relationship with all existing social parameters. Thus he also has discarded the “dialectical” relationships among different ideologies in a geo-social format. In reality the ideology and only the ideology controls and regulates the politics of the signification process. Thus political ideology may not proceed with the religious ideology and different religious ideologies have open, ‘not imaginary’, confrontation with each other.

Marx had shown the binary conflict that working class people have their own ideology which is opposed to the capitalist class. So the ideology substantially determines a way of life of a person, which may or may not express its alignment with other people’s lives. Thus opposed to the concept of illusion, ideology can be substantiated by its social and material outcomes, which on the other hand assure or define cultural dimensions of every living even non-living object. So we live in heterogeneous codifications of ideologies. But neo-Marxist theories didn’t correspond to any revolutionary change of existing society or social conditions and also denounced class identities of common mass to release ideology from any structural or revolutionary composition. Noted Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci has dealt with the ideology as synonymous to the struggle. He however recognized unification of working class people and organized struggle for ideology to organize a revolution. Another Sociologist E. Veron defined, “...if ideologies are structures ... then they are not ‘images’ nor ‘concepts’ but are sets of rules which determine an organization  and the functioning of images and concepts... Ideology is a system of coding reality and not a determined set of coded messages ... in this way, ideology becomes autonomous in relation to the consciousness or intention of its agents:  these may be conscious of their points of view about social forms not of the semantic conditions (rules and categories or codification) which make possible these points of view... then an ideology may be defined as a system of semantic rules to generate messages... it is one of the many levels of organization of messages, from the viewpoint of their semantic properties...”

As noted cultural theorist Stuart Hall has explained that in a society, contradiction between significations is an inevitable outcome complying with the natural course of ideologies in social matrices. Thus ideologies can produce structures and also an inherent dynamism on the other hand, which overrule any level of domination from any of the stagnant, age-old ideological practices and remain unaffected. Extending definitions of ideology he has made a successful critique on Marx and Louis Althusser. According to Marx, ideology works because it appears to ground itself in the mere surface appearance of things... it represents social relations as outside of history: unchangeable, inevitable and natural. Thus Stuart Hall argues, despite scientific discoveries involved in the total development European modernity in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Marx defined the whole development as ideological discourse as it recognized and reoriented social relationships and capitalist economic order as inevitable. Hall established that all kinds of social parameters of development set and derive various dimensions of regulatory consciousness [not all to be regarded as dominant] which produce the sources of ideologies. On the other side, Hall, while analyzing Althusser’s view, which “... tended to present the process as too uni-accentual, too functionally adapted to the reproduction of the dominant ideology”, has made a very useful critique, “... Indeed, it was difficult, from the base-line of this theory, to discern how anything but the dominant ideology could ever be reproduced in discourse”. Hall continues arguing, “...since signification was a practice and practice was defined as any process of transformation of a determinate raw material into a determinate product, a transformation effected by a determinate human labour, using determinate means of production, it also followed that signification involved a determinate form of labour, a specific work...”. Thus according to Hall, meaning is not therefore determined by the structure of reality but by the process of signification being appropriately done through social practice. This is also to be noted that the meaning, then, may not be as obvious as the given structure of reality but the signification can produce another dimension of meaning also. Hall also has made a useful recognition of social struggle which always influences the signification. Thus in this way of analysis Stuart Hall has recognized the inevitability of ideological struggle as a necessity to organize a movement. He nicely argues that if a trade union has lost its ideological struggle then the dominant capitalist interest may get an easy success to curb down the movement by imposing legal and political or administrative means.

Signification, Plurality & Politics:

It is already discussed that signification leads to a cultural outcome of contemporary social practices which naturally ensures cultural heterogeneity of a geo-social periphery. So there is a natural tendency to have one cultural prophecy may emerge as dominating other cultural forms in a pluralist format. But this process, at least, in contemporary social practices can hardly leave the idea of ‘ruling class’ or ‘oppressed class’ as to be easily identified. Naturally the question of the future of organized ideological struggle is gradually getting harder to answer. This jolt, however, even problematizes the Marx’s seminal concept that “...the ideas of the ruling classes are in every epoch the ruling ideas”, i.e., the ruling class also rules intellectual properties. Even in the contemporary developing societies such traditional identification marks of ruling class steadily get fragmenting and the situation becomes trickier than to be identified in the above manner. EMS’s analysis on Chinese dictatorship as dictatorship of the entire people against small stratum of the ‘former ruling class’ depicts such a fragmentation of traditional identification process.

Specially in developing countries the need for industrialization accentuates some emerging cultural trends which are gradually homogenizing the mode of social practices and ideological stance by almost identical syntagmatic arrangements of signs in commercial outlets. There is no doubt about that the underlying politics of signification of these syntagms is to dominate the lookers mystifying the notion of subordinating them as consumers. Though some will definitely feel oppressed and there are still millions of people left out of this aspect of development, it is yet difficult to virtually identify people who are to be considered as oppressed. It is doubtless that people of low income group [as measured by the administration] can always be identified as oppressed; and, the slogan of ‘education for all’ is not yet achieved, but the civil society believes that people are to be paid according to the degree of some people’s education. It is then very hard to distinguish the ruling class and oppressed class in such all round plurality. Only no alternative condition exists in these developing countries probably in ‘Bustee’[slums] areas where people are really barred from getting minimum civic amenities, but this signification is also no longer valid because both public institutions and NGOs nowadays claim to have initiated several measures of developing these areas and its people. Moreover the overall awareness toward Parliamentary Democracy has transformed the cultural aspirations of poor people and even destitute to reject the validity of domination from a single-dimensional authority. As Stuart Hall argues, “that notion of domination which meant the direct imposition of one framework, by overt force or ideological compulsion, on a subordinate class, was not sophisticated enough to match the real complexities of the case”, the situation of developing countries tells us exactly this truth. If it goes now to be difficult to identify ruling class, how can we determine the signification of “hegemony”? But the unequivocal truth is that people are nowadays found severely oppressed by the rules or regulations of number of establishments which cannot be structured under a single nationalist umbrella. Actually the notion of industrialization in developing nations has been justified by two modes of signification:

The first one is that even to be oppressed a person needs first to get at least a job to survive. The second one is that while inviting foreign investment you will have to accept the farthest extent of full fledged corporate-cultural domination which is the prime responsible for fragmenting traditional social bonds and cultural continuity into many sub-cultural structures in the society. Both fiscal and monetary deficits in the developing countries [analyzed in Indian context] have reached to a point of absurdity that they even are not in a position to prepare its infrastructure for foreign investment and for which they invite foreign institutions to build up infrastructure. But they have chosen the easiest way to open up the economy and market and reformed economic structure favourable to that, without doing anything for internal economic and administrative reforms for earning revenues on its own axis. It is needles to say that this signification also has been countered by several other significations. Probably the most valid signification is that despite being able to understand the corporate-cultural domination the developing countries must organize rapid industrial development for its own survival. Moreover the growing social movements against such stream of development have not given any political or ideological alternative which the common mass can really depend upon. So who is there to represent the ruling class and is supposed to oppress the common people? It is absolutely difficult to identify.

Signification and the process of mediation:

At this juncture plurality in the developing societies are accentuated mainly by the development and concentration of media and other signifying institutions. On the other hand media reveal its most distinguishable feature of producing consensus in the society among the prevalent pluralist outcomes of socio-cultural activities. Such consensus is doubtless to be existing beyond any mass political ideology. So media whereas trying to be producing consensus, cannot be held direct responsible to hold the power and be hegemonic to its audience or the society. So far the wide spectra of the process of mediation occurring in mass communication, which sets ideological plurality in a social format, media often flow its contents beyond the ‘sovereign will of the people’ and have become powerful to claim to have people’s opinion. On the other hand Daniel Chandler argues interestingly about the mediation process of other social institutions, “our social institutions also involve processes of mediation, which ‘organize, select and focus the environment through various transformational structures.’ They tend to channel human behaviour into predictable routines...”. It is thus to be clarified analytically that all kinds social and media institutions in a society try to mediate messages comprising of their cultural codes to perpetuate its sustainability. Chandler’s critique looks very important here in this context, “we can be so familiar with the medium that we are ‘anaesthetized’ to the mediation it involves: we ‘don’t know what we’re missing’. Insofar as we are numbed to the processes involved we cannot be said to be exercising ‘choices’ in its use. In this way the means we use may modify our ends...”. specially in developing societies the concept of plurality through the process of mediation has equivocality in a cultural domain of two sides. One is the process of formulation and other is the process of decoding. Social and media institutions often formulate plurality in terms of its narrow corporate objectives with a notion to feed the mainstream views of all the sects but often found less accommodative recognizing alternative or sub-structures of a society. While in formulation of plurality, these institutions are not very keen to explore and accept all sources of ideologies which may proceed against the plurality what they try to formulate to earn best out of every bargain. On the other hand people with its individuality or different forms of smaller sub-cultural identity, accept plurality to participate in a mediated or given consensus to avoid any risk or institutional pressure while decoding the message. So they have to be quite compromising decoding a message what media disseminate to ensure consensus in its favour. Here the concept of deviant attitude cannot be sustained though plurality with all its heterogeneous properties apparently looks very kind enough to recognize or absorb any deviant attitude. So a severe institutional pressure has finally resulted to become both necessary and sufficient trends of plurality or the neo-liberal pluralism.