AUT: Bloch's conception of ideology

[Michael Handelman <mhandelman1@xxxxxxxxx>]

I found a very fascinating article about Bloch's
conception of ideology critique:

http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/Illumina%20Folder/kell1.htm

"Bloch's Concept of Ideology Critique

I think that Bloch is most useful today in providing a
model of cultural theory and ideology critique that is
quite different from, and arguably better than,
dominant models which present ideology critique as the
demolition of bourgeois culture and ideology, thus, in
effect, conflating bourgeois culture and ideology.
This model -- found in Lenin and most
Marxist-Leninists like Althusser, but also to some
extent in the Frankfurt School --interprets dominant
ideology primarily as instruments of mystification,
error, and domination which are contrasted to science
or Marxist theory, or "Critical Theory." The function
of ideology critique on this model is simply to
demonstrate the errors, mystifications, and ruling
class interest within ideological artifacts which are
then smashed and discarded by the heavy hammer of the
ideology critic.

Such a model is, of course, rooted in Marx's own texts
for whom ideology was the ideas of the ruling class,
ideas which legitimated bourgeois rule, ideas which
mystified social conditions, covering over oppression
and inequality, and ideas which thus produced false
consciousness and furthered bourgeois class
domination.[2] Within the Marxian tradition, there is
also a more positive concept of ideology, developed by
Lenin, which sees socialist ideology as a positive
force for developing revolutionary consciousness and
promoting socialist development. Bloch, however, is
more sophisticated than those who simply denounce all
ideology as false consciousness, or who stress the
positive features of socialist ideology. Rather, Bloch
sees emancipatory-utopian elements in all living
ideologies, and deceptive and illusory qualities as
well.

For Bloch, ideology is "Janus-faced," two-sided: it
contains errors, mystifications, and techniques of
manipulation and domination, but it also contains a
utopian residue or surplus that can be used for social
critique and to advance progressive politics. In
addition, to reconstructing and refocusing the theory
and practice of ideology critique, Bloch also enables
us to see ideology in many phenomena usually neglected
by Marxist and other ideology critiques: daydreams,
popular literature, architecture, department store
displays, sports, or clothing. In this view, ideology
pervades the organization and details of everyday
life. Thus, ideology critique should be a critique of
everyday life, as well as critique of political texts
and positions, or the manifestly evident political
ideologies of Hollywood films, network television, or
other forms of mass-mediated culture.[3]

Previous Marxist theories of ideology, by contrast,
tended to equate ideology with texts, with political
discourses, and with attempts to mystify class
relations and to advance class domination. Ideology
critique then, on this model, would simply expose and
denounce the textual mechanisms of mystification and
would attempt to replace Ideology with Truth. Bloch
would dismiss this merely denunciatory approach to
ideology critique as "half-enlightenment," which he
compares to genuine enlightenment. Half-enlightenment
"has nothing but an attitude," i.e. rationalistic
dismissal of all mystification, superstition, legend,
and so on that does not measure up to its scientific
criteria.[4] Genuine enlightenment, on the other hand,
criticizes any distortions in an ideological product,
but then goes on to take it more seriously, to read it
closely for any critical or emancipatory potential.
Half-enlightenment deludes itself, first, by thinking
that truth and enlightenment can be obtained solely by
eliminating error rather than offering something
positive and attractive. Indeed, Bloch believes that
part of the reasons why the Left was defeated by the
Right in Weimar Germany is because the Left tended to
focus simply on criticism, on negative denunciations
of capitalism and the bourgeoisie, whereas fascism
provided a positive vision and attractive alternatives
to masses desperately searching for something better.

Against merely negative ideology critique, Bloch urges
us to pay close attention to potential progressive
contents within artifacts or phenomena frequently
denounced and dismissed as mere ideology. For Bloch,
ideology contained an "anticipatory" dimension, in
which its discourses, images, and figures produced
utopian images of a better world. Utopian elements,
however, co-exist with "merely embellishing ones"
(148). In some cases, this amounts to a "merely
dubious polishing of what exists" (149). Such
apologetic functions "reconcile the subject with what
exists" (ibid). Such purposes appears above all "in
periods of class society which are no longer
revolutionary" (ibid). Even in this situation,
however, ideologies may contain embellishing elements
that anticipate a better world, that express in
abstract and idealist fashion the potentialities for a
better future. If such ideologies deceive individuals
into believing that the present society has already
realized such ideals, they serve mystificatory
functions, but Bloch's method of cultural criticism
also wants us to interrogate these ideologies for
their utopian contents, for their anticipations of a
better world, which can help us to see what is
deficient and lacking in this world and what should be
fought for to produce a better (i.e. freer and
happier) future.

Bloch therefore restores to radical theory a cultural
heritage that is often neglected or dismissed as
merely ideology. Critique of ideology, Bloch argues,
is not merely unmasking (Entlarvung), or
de-mystification, but is also uncovering and
discovery: revelations of unrealized dreams, lost
possibilities, abortive hopes -- that can be
resurrected and enlivened and realized in our current
situation. Bloch's cultural criticism thus accentuates
the positive, the utopian-emancipatory possibilities,
the testimony to hopes for a better world. As Habermas
dramatically puts it:

What Bloch wants to preserve for socialism, which
subsists on scorning tradition, is the tradition of
the scorned. In contrast to the unhistorical procedure
of Feuerbach's criticism of ideology, which deprived
Hegel's 'sublation' (Aufhebung) of half of its meaning
(forgetting elevare and being satisfied with tollere),
Bloch presses the ideologies to yield their ideas to
him; he wants to save that which is true in false
consciousness: 'All great culture that existed
hitherto has been the foreshadowing of an achievement,
inasmuch as images and thoughts can be projected from
the ages' summit into the far horizon of the future.'

Bloch believed that even ideological artifacts contain
expressions of desire and articulations of needs that
radical theory and politics should heed to provide
programs and discourses which appeal to deep-seated
desires for a better life. Ideologies also provide
clues to possibilities for future development and
contain a "surplus" or "excess" that is not exhausted
in mystification or legitimation. And ideologies may
contain normative ideals whereby the existing society
can be criticized and models of an alternative
society. For example, the notion of the citoyen
(citizen) in bourgeois ideology with its individual
rights, civil liberties, and actively engaged autonomy
expressed something more than mere legitimation and
apologetics for bourgeois institutions and practices.
Bloch takes seriously Marx's position that the task of
socialism is to fully realize certain bourgeois
ideals. Throughout his life, Bloch argued that
Marxism, as it was constituted in its Social
Democratic and other leading versions, was vitiated by
a one-sided, inadequate, and merely negative approach
to ideology.

For Bloch, the problem of ideology "is broached from
the side of the problem of cultural inheritance, of
the problem as to how works of the superstructure
progressively reproduce themselves in cultural
consciousness even after disappearance of their social
bases" (154). Such notions contain a cultural surplus
that lives on and provides a utopian function whereby
the ideal can still be translated into a reality and
thus be fully realized for the first time. Although
for Bloch the primary site of ideology is the cultural
superstructure -- philosophy, religion, art, and so on
--the superstructure contains a cultural surplus and
thus cannot be reduced to mere ideology. For Bloch,
the cultural surplus preserves unsatisfied desires and
human wishes for a better world and because these
wishes are usually not fulfilled they contain contents
which remain relevant to a future society which may be
able to satisfy these wishes and needs. In other
words, ideology contains hints as to what human beings
desire and need which can be used to criticize
failures to satisfy these needs and to realize these
desires in the current society.

Ideology critique thus requires not only demolition
but also hermeneutics, for ideology in Bloch's view
contains pre-conscious elements or what Bloch calls
the "Not-Yet-Conscious." Properly understood, the
Not-Yet-Conscious may point to real possibilities for
social development and real potentials for human
liberation. Bloch tends to present the theory of
utopian surplus along historical-materialist lines in
terms of the rise and fall of social classes. Utopian
surplus generally appears when a class is rising: the
ascending class criticizes the previous order and
projects a wealth of proposals for social change, as
when the bourgeoisie attacked the feudal order for its
lack of individual freedom, rights, democracy, and
class mobility. Bourgeois critiques of feudalism
proliferated, as did revolutionary proposals for a new
society. Some of these ideas were incorporated into
bourgeois constitutions, declarations of rights, and
some were even institutionalized in the bourgeois
order.[5]

Thus culture ranges for Bloch from an ideal type of
pure ideology to purely non-ideological emancipatory
culture. Purely ideological artifacts embellish or
legitimate an oppressive existing reality, as when
Bloch speaks of ideology as that which excludes all
progressive elements (9). Most cultural artifacts,
however, contain a mixture of ideology and utopian
elements. Since ideologies are rhetorical constructs
that attempt to persuade and to convince, they must
have a relatively rational and attractive core and
thus often contain emancipatory promises or moments.
Drawing on Bloch, Fredric Jameson has suggested that
mass cultural texts often have utopian moments and
proposes that radical cultural criticism should
analyze both the social hopes and fantasies in
cultural artifacts, as well as the ideological ways in
which fantasies are presented, conflicts are resolved,
and potentially disruptive hopes and anxieties are
managed.[6]

In his reading of Jaws, for instance, the shark stands
in for a variety of fears (uncontrolled organic nature
threatening the artificial society, big business
corrupting and endangering community, disruptive
sexuality threatening the disintegration of the family
and traditional values, and so on) which the film
tries to contain through the reassuring defeat of evil
by representatives of the current class structure. Yet
the film also contains utopian images of family,
male-bonding, and adventure, as well as socially
critical visions of capitalism which articulate fears
that unrestrained big business would inexorably
destroy the environment and community. In Jameson's
view, mass culture thus articulates social conflicts,
contemporary fears and utopian hopes, and attempts at
ideological containment and reassurance. In his view:

works of mass culture cannot be ideological without at
one and the same time being implicitly or explicitly
Utopian as well: they cannot manipulate unless they
offer some genuine shred of content as a fantasy bribe
to the public about to be so manipulated. Even the
'false consciousness' of so monstrous a phenomenon of
Nazism was nourished by collective fantasies of a
Utopian type, in 'socialist' as well as in nationalist
guises. Our proposition about the drawing power of the
works of mass culture has implied that such works
cannot manage anxieties about the social order unless
they have first revived them and given them some
rudimentary expression; we will now suggest that
anxiety and hope are two faces of the same collective
consciousness, so that the works of mass culture, even
if their function lies in the legitimation of the
existing order -- or some worse one -- cannot do their
job without deflecting in the latter's service the
deepest and most fundamental hopes and fantasies of
the collectivity, to which they can therefore, no
matter in how distorted a fashion, be found to have
given voice.[7]

Film like Jaws, for instance, might use utopian images
to provide a critique of the loss of community, and
its destruction by commercial interests. Popular texts
may thus enact social criticism in their ideological
scenarios and one of the tasks of radical cultural
criticism is to specify utopian, critical, subversive,
or oppositional meanings, even within the texts of
so-called mass culture. For these artifacts may
contain implicit and even explicit critiques of
capitalism, sexism, or racism, or visions of freedom
and happiness which can provide critical perspectives
on the unhappiness and unfreedom in the existing
society. The Deer Hunter, for instance, though an
arguably reactionary text, contains utopian images of
community, working class and ethnic solidarity, and
personal friendship which provides critical
perspectives on the atomism, alienation, and loss of
community in everyday life under contemporary
capitalism. The utopian images of getting high and
horsing around in the drug hootch in Platoon provide
visions of racial harmony and individual and social
happiness which provide a critical perspective on the
harrowing war scenes and which code war as a
disgusting and destructive human activity. The images
of racial solidarity and transcendence in the dance
numbers of Zoot Suit provide a utopian and critical
contrast to the oppression of people of color found in
the scenes of everyday and prison life in the film.
And the transformation of life in the musical numbers
of Pennies From Heaven provide critical perspectives
on the degradation of everyday life due to the
constraints of an unjust and irrational economic
system which informs the realist sections of the film.


Ideologies thus pander to human desires, fantasies,
anxieties, and hopes and cultural artifacts must
address these, if they are to be successful. Ideology
and utopia are thus interconnected and culture is
saturated with utopian content. On the other hand,
ideologies exploit and distort this utopian content
and should be criticized to expose their merely
embellishing, legitimating, and mystifying elements."

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