Marxism 2: Ideology & Hegemony Antonio Gramsci(1891-1937) Althusser, Louis (1918-1990)

Althusser, Louis (1918-1990)
Marxism 2:
Ideology & Hegemony
Antonio Gramsci(1891-1937)
Marxism: Topics & Schools on
Focus
1. Marx and Vulgar
Marxism
2. Western Marxists :
Althusser’s theory of
Ideology &
Gramsci’s
Hegemony
3. American & British
Marxism: Jameson
and Eagleton
4. Foucault &文學社會
學的多重互動模式
1. Dialectic
Materialism, Class
and
Commodification
2. Literature &
Society
3. Marxist Literary
Criticism
4. Literature as
Discoure
Outline
• Marx: Q & A
• Superstructure and Base: Debates
and Related Issues
• Ideology defined
• L. Althusser
• Examples of Ideology
• A. Gramsci
• Examples of hegemony
• References and for next time
Marx: Q & A
• What is materialist determinism? (chap
5: 212)
• What are the evils of capitalism
according to Marx? (e.g. chap 5: 213; chap
6: 83)
• What solutions does he offer and will
it work? (chap 5: 213)
• Why are commodities fetishized?
Superstructure vs. Economic Base
in the History of Marxism:
1. Marx, Lenin 
1.
Stalin’s politicization
2.
of literature;
2. Marx, Lenin 
Western Marxism (e.g.
Lukacs, Brecht,
Benjamin, Adorno)
(chap 5: 214-16;
chap 6: 84)
3.
3. Poststructuralist
Marxism -- Althusser;
4.
4. Neo-Marxists’ use of
Gramsci
(lit. as propaganda)
Realism vs.
Modernism debate;
their critique of
culture industry;
(variations of
reflectionism)
Over-determination
Conflicting
Hegemonies
Literature & Society (1)
• Literature of Commitment & Reflectionism
(chap 5: 215)-Related questions:
-- What are the functions of literature?
-- Is good literature politically committed
literature?
-- Does literature have to “reflect” its society,
or help promote a certain political cause?
-- On the other hand, can literature be
completely un-political?
Literature & Society (2)
• Ways of reflecting society indirectly
– not through content but through forms
(e.g. fragmentary form as a way to
reflect social fragmentation);
– incorporating different ideologies
Ideology Defined
• “rigid set of ideas”; e.g. somebody
refrains from eating meat “for
practical rather than ideological
reasons.” --negative
• ruling ideology: legitimating the power
of the dominant group--negative
• sets of ideas to justify certain
organized social actions --could be
positive or negative
• ＊sets of ideas to justify certain
actions while masking their real
nature. –negative
(chap 6: 84-85)
Althusser, Louis (1918-1990)
• Born 1918 in Algiers;
• Joined the Communist Party in Paris in 1948.
• Murdered his wife in 1980, and was confined to an
asylum till his death in 1990.
• Influential works: For Marx (1965) and Lenin and
Philosophy (1969).
• Attempted to reconcile
Marxism with Structuralism.
(source)
Althusser’s Revision of Marxism
1. Sees Ideology – not as just ideas or
“false consciousness” (which implies
“true consciousness”);
2. Argues for Literature’s “Relative
autonomy” from Base; it is determined
by Base in the last instance (ultimately);
3. Explains both social structure and
individual subject’s position in relation
to ideology.
Ideology Defined by Althusser
• (chap 6: 85; chap 5: 217)
• Ideology is a ‘Representation’ of the
Imaginary Relationship of Individuals to
their Real Conditions of Existence.
• Ideology has the function of constituting
individual as subjects. (Interpellation)
* Ideology is not any idea; it should be a
system of ideas (representation) produced
by some institutions (state apparatuses 國
家機器)
Ideologies: Examples
•Which of the following are part of a certain ideology
-- produced by some ISA, distorting some reality ?
1. 我以身為台灣人為榮。
我以身為美國人為榮。
2. 阿扁是台灣之子，是全
民的總統。
3. 一日為師，終生為父。
4. God is truth.
5. The Earth is round.
6. It is human nature to
love.
7. Men are from Mars;
women from Venus.
1. Nationalism; patriotism;
2. “The Taiwanese”;
populism;
3. ISA = school in patriarchal
society;
4. Church
5. --so the myth of 女媧補天 is
a mere superstition.
6. --so I can love anyone I’d
like.
7. --so we should not expect
men to comfort or support
others.
Social Structure—
of Vulgar Marxist
Ideology: the ruling ideas of the ruling
class imposed on the other classes.
Superstructure
e.g. Literature of the middle class,
of proletariat
Base(as foundation, center)
relations of production,
means of production
Parallel,
reflect
Literature/Culture & Economic Base
relatively autonomous from;
• reflect, embody, perform, transform,
critique
Multiple Ideologies
Social Levels
Over-determination
Social Formation -- de-centered
• State Apparatuses (Repressive &
Ideological)
學校
警察
Superstructure
法院
ISA
文學
家庭
Base
軍隊
RSA
Lit. work: Relative autonomous
• over-determined;
• economic influences mediated (媒介) through
various ISA’s
主要意識形態
文學史；文類
文學
作
品
書
局 作者／讀者
行銷
Superstructure
學
院
文學生產方式；
生產關係；
Base
Ideology: an Artistic Example
• From Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538)
Ideology: an Artistic Example
• To Manet’s Olympia (1863) pay attention
to her gaze, her hand, the black woman
and the black cat.
Ideology: an Artistic Example
• Manet’s Olympia
--multiple ideologies:
1) sexual capitalism critiqued;
2) the blackness inscribed as a
backdrop.
Ideology: some CF’s
• 創蘋記
Contemporary Ideology of Love :
stereotypes
• Love = motorcycle or car; wayward
or weepy women + tolerant and
strong men
Love – no fixed or human object
of love
•遠傳電信-預付卡-愛情告白 (cell phone
as my dear )
•遠傳電信-i拉列369費率-愛情無價
(because the cell phone rate is cheap)
Literary Example -- The Great
Gatsby –first reunion
• How are images of romance and money
intertwined in the first excerpt?
• Images of romance: beauty, tears, light,
flowers,
• Light  G’s house, how he earn the
money.
• Images of nature + culture in G’s
mansion  the guests
• G’s romantic sentiments
throwing
cloths at Daisy
Literary Example -- The Great
Gatsby –the past
• What does Daisy mean to Gatsby?
• Images of ascendance (ladder)
and of life and wonder;
• An elusive rhythm, a fragment of
lost words,
• Daisy– perishable, only an
incarnation of something else. 
social position or fullness of life,
or both?
The Great Gatsby –the ending
• Green light –again more important than
Daisy
“ He did not know that it was already
behind him, somewhere back in the vast
obscurity beyond the city, where the dark
fields of the republic rolled on under the
night.
Gatsby believes in the green light, the
orgiastic future that year by year recedes
before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no
matter--tomorrow we will run faster,
stretch our arms out farther . . . so we
beat on, boats against the current, born
back ceaselessly into the past.”
The Great Gatsby:
undesirable desire
• Tom’s for Myrtle;
• Nick’s relationship with Jordan
Baker;
• Gatsby’s love for Daisy
• Nick's interest in Gatsby the
bootlegger, hoodlum, millionaire, and
what he represents The American
Dream (green backs + Nature)
The Great Gatsby:
undesirable desire (2)
• The American Dream for Fitzgerald –
pure at first but polluted by
materialism
• G: “Her voice is full of money”
• N: “It was full of money—that was the
inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in
it, the cymbals’ song of it . . . High in a
white palace the king’s daughter, the
golden girl.”
GG in the context of Modernism
(for your reference)
• The moderns -- a simultaneity of
incongruities and paradoxes.
• Modernism was defined as a time of
"refusal"--of middle-class pieties,
scientific or philosophic certainty,
propriety, tradition, and faith (Hoffman
32-33, 40 qtd Kaplan 145).
•  setting up untraditional tradition;
looking for undesirable desire.
GG in the context of Modernism
(for your reference 2)
• Undesirable desire is a guilty pleasure, not a mere
paradox or incongruity.
• The trope of undesirable desire provided a covert
means of getting in on cultural debates over national
belonging, of participating--through the construction
of desirable and undesirable love objects--in the
national debate over who was and was not a
desirable American and why. (Kaplan 147)
•  G –the desirable, Daisy and Tom, the
undesirable. But the problem is that it’s
hard to distinguish them from each other.
From Ideology to Hegemony
1. Hegemony = Dominant Ideology,
but not always controlling us;
2. Gramsci: considers the role of
the organic intellectual and
competing hegemonies.
Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)
•
• Supporter of Russian
revolution and activist in
socialist transformation
throughout the advanced
capitalist world.
• Arrested in 1926, kept in
prison 1928 – 1937, where he
wrote the Prison Notebook.
Hegemony: control by consent
• Chap 6: 88-89)
• Ideological leadership; consensual control;
• "...Dominant groups in society, including
fundamentally but not exclusively the
ruling class, maintain their dominance by
securing the 'spontaneous consent' of
subordinate groups, including the working
class, through the negotiated construction
of a political and ideological consensus
which incorporates both dominant and
dominated groups." (Strinati, 1995: 165)
• (source http://www.theory.org.uk/ctrgram.htm#hege )
Gramsci– hegemony not secure
• not given to the dominant group, but "has
to be won, reproduced, sustained."
Hegemony can only be maintained so long
as the dominant classes succeed in
framing all competing definitions within
their range... so that the subordinate
groups either controlled or contained
within an ideological space. . . (13;
Norton 2455)
Hegemony: examples –images of
the Blacks
• Winning spontaneous consent through
granting of superficial 'concessions'
(Strinati,1995:167 qtd Mystry). This
involves the dominant group making
'compromises' that are (or appear as)
favourable to the dominated group, but
that which actually do nothing to disrupt
the hegemony of the dominators.
black images
• I. Three stereotypes: Mammy, slaves,
clown spontaneous consensus to their
slavery or inferiority.
• II. Positive images based on normative
white ideals
• Images in late 80’s: e.g.
• --the middle-class household of
The Cosby Show points out that
there is 'nothing black' about
the Huxtable's lifestyle
(Mercer 1989:6 qtd in Mystry).
Strategies of containment
Sympathy shown for the minorities,
but with the whites as the real heroes.
e.g. Cry Freedom;
The Last of the
Mohicans, Dances
with Wolves
Counter Hegemonic
Practices: e.g. Hip
Hop.
References
• Louis Althusser Archive
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/
• Kaplan, Carla “Undesirable Desire:
Citizenship and Romance in Modern
American Fiction” Modern Fiction Studies 43.1 (1997) 144-169.
• An Introduction to Gramsci's Life and
Thought http://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/intro.htm
• Antonio Gramsci http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-gram.htm
• Mistry, Reena. “Can Gramsci's theory of
hegemony help us to understand the
representation of ethnic minorities in western
television and cinema?” http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-rol6.htm
Next time: Marxist Literary
Criticism
• (Reader: chap 5 pp. 217-22; chap 6
to p. 89-94 )
• P. Macherey, F. Jameson & T.
Eagleton as a focus.
• "The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock“  ideologies of the author,
the genre and the time?