christopher norris - review

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Ideology. A Review

CHRISTOPHER NORRIS

In Ideology: An Introduction (Verso, 1991) Terry Eagleton returnsonce again to a topic that has often preoccupied his thinking, fromthe high Althusserian rigour of Criticism an d Ideology (1976) to his

recent major work on the history of aesthetics as a surrogate formof ideological discourse. Not that he is merely recycling old ideas ina different polemical context. On the contrary, Eagleton's analysishas deepened and evolved over the years through exposure to thevarious contending schools of post-Althusserian theory. Some ofthese arguments he has taken on board, albeit with a growingmeasure of critical reserve. Others he has berated - not withoutreason - as philosophically incoherent, politically bankrupt, or irre-levant to the practical Marxist interest in grasping and transformingour conditions of life in the late twentieth-century Western liberalpseudo-democracies. Certainly Eagleton has taken full stock of thosechallenges to the Althusserian paradigm that have come from somany quarters of late (poststructuralist, postmodernist, neopragma-

tist, anti-foundationalist etc.), and whose effect has been to generatea widespread suspicion of any such 'discourse' ultimately wedded tothe concepts and categories of Marxist Ideologiekritik. In a series ofskirmishing polemical rejoinders he has managed to appropriatesome elements of this current linguistic turn without giving way onthe basic point, i.e. the primacy of real-world socioeconomic condi-tions and the role of ideology as in some sense an alibi, a realm offalse appearances or illusory knowledge-effects.

To the obvious question - in what sense, precisely? - his bookshave returned quite a range of differing answers, from the scientistictruth-claims of that early Althusserian phase to the mixture of



266 IDEOLOGY: A REVIEW

activist rhetoric and 'post-theoretical' scepticism that marked theconcluding chapter of Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983). Infact one could chart the various visions and revisions of Eagleton'sintellectual trajectory to date by tracing the way that ideology hasfigure d from one bo ok to the next, not least in those periods when

his writing registered a sense of unease with any too confidentbeating of the bounds between theory (or Marxist 'theoreticalpractice') and ideology as the realm of false consciousness or ima-ginary misrecognition. But he has never gone along with any versionof that facile postmodernist wisdom which holds such talk to behopelessly passe, just a product of the old 'Enlightenment' ethoswhose appeal to various categorical distinctions - truth/falsehoo d,knowledge/belief, theory/ideology, etc. - has now been revealed asnothing more than a piece of self-serving bogus rhetoric. For theupshot of this and previous variations on the end-of-ideology themehas always been to undermine any kind of argued oppositionalcritique by making out that consensus ideas and values go all theway down; that there is no getting outside the goldfish-bowl (or

'hermeneutic circle') of received opinion; and hence that we might aswell give up on the effort - especially the self-deluding Marxist effort- to attain som e critical perspective beyond wha t is currently andcontingently 'good in the way of belief.

Postmodernism is simply the latest name for this line of all-purpose conformist ideology whose uses have tended to becomemost apparent at times of widespread political retreat amongthinkers of an erstwhile left or left-liberal persuasion. And nowhereare the signs more plainly to be read than in the current 'post-Marxist' revisionist trend which claims to have thought its waythrough and beyond all the categories of old-style Ideologiekritik.

The result, as Eagleton wryly observes, is an odd situation where'radical' theories are scrambling to vacate the moral and epistemolo-

gical high ground, while on every hand we witness a spectacularresurgence of ideologies ranging from Christian and Islamic funda-mentalism to George Bush's vaunted 'New World Order', the rise ofvarious nationalist or militant separatist movements, and - nearerhome - 'the most ideologically aggressive and explicit regime ofliving political memory, in a society which traditionally prefers itsruling values to remain implicit and oblique'. When things havereached this point, he suggests, it is time to revisit some of the oldarguments and see what is at stake in the postmodern turn againsttheory and all its works.

In this latest book Eagleton has two main purposes in view. One



IDEOLOGY: A REV IEW 267

is to clear away some long-standing sources of confusion by examin-ing the various senses that have attached to the term 'ideology',from its enlightenment origins to its complicated history in therecent (post-AJthusserian) context of deba te. The other - followingdirectly from this - is to show how postmodernists, neopragmatists

and others have exploited those same confusions so as to make itappear that any talk of 'ideology' is hooked on a hopelessly naiveset of doctrines about knowledge, reality and truth. This two-pronged approach enables him to cut through swathes of fashion-able nonsense, from the notion (as propounded way back by BarryHindess and Paul Hirst) that the real is entirely a product of this orthat discourse, language-game or 'signifying practice', to the anticsof a postmodern guru like Jean Baudrillard, one for whom truth-talk is the merest of illusions, since we now inhabit a world of free-floating signifiers, simulacra or signs without referents where 'reality'is whatever we make of it according to the latest (no matter howdistorted) consensus view. Then again, there is the line of supposedlyknock-down neopragmatist argument - 'travelling anti-theory', as it

might be called - espoused by philosophers like Richard Rorty anda whole current school of literary critics, among them the egregiousStanley Fish. These thinkers claim to demonstrate the sheer impossi-bility of advancing any truth-claims save those that make sense bythe lights of some existing 'interpretive community', some in-placeset of conventional beliefs impervious to any form of reasoned orprincipled critique.

Eagleton responds to all of this with a mixture of strong counter-argument on philosophic grounds and straightforward appeal to thesocial and political realities which postmodernism so blithely brushesaside. Thus: 'the thesis that objects are entirely internal to the dis-courses which constitute them raises the thorny problem of how wecould ever judge that a discourse has constructed its object validly

. . . How can an yone, on this theory, ever be wrong?' A nd withreference to later, more a la mode versions of the same ultra-relati-vist creed: 'no individual life, not even Jean Baudrillard's, cansurvive entirely bereft of meaning, and any society which took thisnihilistic road would be nurturing massive social disruption'. Whathis book brings out with particular force is the extent to which post-modernism and kindred discourse-oriented doctrines trade on adrastically simplified conception of language, one that takes overSaussure's synchronic-descriptive methodology - including its indif-

ference to the referential aspect of the sign - but which raises thatpurely heuristic precept into a high point of anti-realist dogma with



268 IDEOLOGY: A REVIEW

dire theoretical and political consequences. Along with this goes a

widespread confusion - as remarked by realist opponents like Roy

Bhaskar - between ontological and epistemological issues. Hence the

patently absurd idea that since reality is always construed under a

certain description, that is to say, in accordance with some pre-given

set of linguistic or intra-discursive categories, therefore we might aswell jun k the belief in a real world of ma terial o bjects, processes and

events that exis t qui te apart from our current (whol ly 'arbi t rary ')

modes of conceptual izat ion. And from here i t i s a short enough s tep

to that point of extreme cognitive scepticism whose upshot - as with

Ba udrillard - is an attitude of last-ditch mo ral and political retreat.

Eagleton makes short work of such claims, together with the end-

of-ideology thesis that they are commonly assumed to entai l . For

they will only seem convincing if one takes it as read that reality is

just what we are given to make of i t according to the dominant con-

sensus view, or - in Rorty 's neopragmatis t parlance - what is cur-

rent ly and cont ingent ly 'good in the way of belief. Otherwise this

whole l ine of argument wil l appear nothing more than a handy

escape-route, a means of embracing conformist ideas and valueswhile neatly avoiding such old-fashioned topics as the 'political

responsibility of the intellectuals '. It is not only postmodernists who

are travelling this road, as Eagleton reminds us in some sharply

diagnost ic pages devoted to those soi-disant 'post -Marxis t ' th inkers -

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe among them - who have set

about recast ing the pol i t ical agenda through a process that reduces

everything to the level of 'discourses', 'subject-positions', 'enun-

ciative modalities ' and so forth. The obvious rejoinder, Eagleton

writes:

is that a practice may well be organized like a discourse, but as amatter of fact it is a practice rather than a discourse. It is needlessly

obfuscating and homogenizing to subsume such things as preaching asermon and dislodging a pebble from one's left ear under the samerubric. A way of understanding an object is simply projected into theobject itself, in a familiar idealist move. The contemplative analysis ofa practice suddenly reappears as its very essence . . . The category ofdiscourse is- inflated to the point where it imperializes the whole world,eliding the distinction between thought and material reality.

One should not be misled by the joky analogies and the throw-

away tu rns of phr ase in to thinkin g th at this is just a piece of inter-

ventionist polemic which sidesteps all the deeper theoretical

problems. On the contrary, Eagleton displays a firm grasp of topics



IDEOLOGY: A REVIEW 269

outside the charmed circle of postmodernist debate - among them,issues in epistemology, philosophy of language, historiography,sociology of knowledge etc. - which are pretty much ignored by theend-of-ideology ideologues. Nothing could be further from thenarrow-minded orthodoxy that begins with a handful of Saussurian

slogans wrenched out of context, and which ends up by endorsing acrudely literalized version of Derrida's cryptic statement, 'there isnothing outside the text'. Small wonder that Eagleton's writingshould often take on a polemical tone, especially when engagingwith thinkers like Baudrillard who push these confusions to thepoint of a full-scale exercise in political and intellectual bad faith.

That Ideology has received such a barrage of abuse from right-wing reviewers in the daily and weekly press is one sure sign that itraises questions conveniently shelved by other, more accommodatingstyles of thought. 'If a theory of ideology has any use at all',Eagleton concludes, 'it is in helping to illuminate the processes bywhich liberation from death-dealing beliefs may be practicallyeffected.' Postmodernism requires that we treat such claims as just

another showing of the chronic old realist illusion, coupled with aspecies of quaint left moralism which rests on those same (non-existent) foundations of reality, truth and critique. Anyone temptedto adopt this line might do well to consider Baudrillard's latest, sub-limely fatuous pronouncements on the Guff War as an instance ofpostmodern 'hyperreality', a war that perhap s never occurred - forall that we can know - since it only took place in the fantasy realmof simulated images, war-game scenarios, hi-tech 'saturation'coverage and so forth. One could hardly wish for a clearer illustra-tion of the common postmodernist fallacy, the habit of jumpingfrom a valid diagnosis of contemporary social ills to a set of half-

baked antirealist doctrines - a wholesale negative ontology - whichtreat that condition as a simply inescapable aspect of the way we live

now. It is among the great merits of Eagleton's book that it yieldsno ground to these modish variations on a well-worn sophisticaltheme.

References

Eagleton, Terry (1976). Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary

Theory. New Left Books.

(1988). Literary Theory: An Introduction. Basil Blackwell.

(1991). Ideology: An Introduction. Verso.

christopher norris - review

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