Date: Sat, 31 Dec 1994 11:33:35 -0800 From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org> Subject: TERRY EAGLETON ON (GERMAN) IDEOLOGY TERRY EAGLETON'S BOOK "IDEOLOGY" Following up on one suggestion, I looked up all references to THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY in Eagleton's book, IDEOLOGY. Indeed, there is a substantive discussion of THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY for at least one stretch, and many many other references beside. The rest of the book looks very interesting as well, though I didn't venture outside my original parameters. Eagleton in general is much possessed with defining and deliberating the nature of ideology. He delineates several notions of the concept, and finds at least two notions of ideology in Marx, which he finds in competition with one another. Damn, my memory is shot already: I'm trying to remember these different takes on ideology and I can't. Here goes anyway. One has to do with the social and/or cognitive process by which ideology is produced, regardless of the truth content involved. The other has to do with ideology or false consciousness vs. truth or scientific cognition. With one of these, I can't remember which, there is the question of whether one could have a true ideology, and sometimes one finds this idea in later Marxist writers, not to mention "socialist" states. Eagleton's treatment is an important one. In wrestling with this topic, he at least shows that it is not so easy to pigeonhole Marx as some think. In his most extensive treatment of THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY, while trying to be fair, Eagleton suggests there is something of mechanical materialism in it -- the camera obscura, ideological reflexes of social being, and so on. He contrasts this oversimplified conception with more nuanced scenarios of how ideology functions. His critique is not unreasonable; yet I wonder how committed Marx and Engels were to their allegedly mechanistic conception of 1845-6. Was their notion of how ideology works written in stone, or were they struggling to get the basic notion of the relation between ideology and social reality right? In retrospect one takes as a fait accompli something that originally had to be painfully struggled through and thought out. Stalinism did such an effective job of turning Marx and Engels (to begin with) into sacred texts, we have all become used to thinking of them as authoritative and definitive, as if having emerged from Mount Olympus, as if all tasks were completed, and each stage in development absolute in its intellectual resolution. The camera obscura / reflex, etc. metaphors don't seem to me to constitute a die-hard commitment to mechanistic thinking, but rather an abstraction, such as you get when you systematize your thoughts for the first time. Ideological reflexes of real life processes -- sounds to me like a schematic formulation of a very general notion rather than a finely articulated elaboration of how this actually works. I don't know about the rest of the book, but Eagleton doesn't seem occupied here with the human significance of Marx's break with the rest of his intellectual class, but then, high-powered Marxist literary theorist that he is, he also didn't understand what his fellow Marxist E.P. Thompson was getting at in WITNESS AGAINST THE BEAST: WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE MORAL LAW. True sophistication often conceals itself in an unassuming form, unostentatiously clothing itself in plain English, and is easily overlooked at the Prince's ball. ------------------
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005