Society: Why criticism of ideology? | nd-aktuell.de

How can the approval ratings for the AfD be explained, even though their program contradicts the interests of the majority of their electorate? Why are conspiracy theories and disinformation so virulent and seemingly immune to fact checking? Why is nothing being done about climate change even though the situation is so clear? The problems of the past few years would be predestined for a term that, paradoxically, has been completely left behind in the analyzes of social regression: ideology.

We are used to understanding ideology only as a fighting term against a “woke” or “green” worldview, i.e. with a concrete political foundation. But there is hardly any reference to the analytical content of the infamous “necessarily false consciousness” anymore. The term served to provide insight into those ways of thinking and acting – no matter how critical they seemed to themselves – which ultimately contribute to stabilizing the conditions from which they emerge. The conformist rebelliousness of libertarian authoritarianism, the self-righteous denial of reality of lateral thinkers, the retention of political power through disinformation and populism as well as a positivism under the motto “Trust the Science”: Don’t these sometimes strange ideas only make sense when we see them as organic waste products can understand social conditions?

For almost a century, the concept of ideology was (not only) part of Marxist reflection on the connection between thought and social form. Then he largely fell from grace. Have the prophecies of the 1990s come true that bourgeois society would move into a post-ideological age after the collapse of socialism? What seems more plausible than this claim about the “end of history” – which itself is highly ideologically suspect – is that the concept of ideology reveals such fundamental problems in a critical theory of society that it would be better to drop it altogether.

A truth problem

The most obvious problem that the concept of ideology has is a problem of truth. Because, according to the persistent objection here, anyone who speaks of a false consciousness must therefore also assume a correct one. Marxist theory reacted to this logic with self-relativization: Lenin’s “Marxism is omnipotent because it is true” was replaced by an undogmatic, open Marxism that, out of sheer modesty, did not want to claim any ultimate truth for itself.

The assertion of truth in civil society has a difficult time. The Enlightenment’s very own critical impulse was a relativistic one, which turned against false dogmas of the church and secular authority, and Marx also began his work with the criticism of religion. But as Max Horkheimer commented on the instrumental rationality that developed from this: “Freedom from the rule of dogmatic authority” goes hand in hand with the “attitude of neutrality towards every intellectual content”. With mere relativism it is “also impossible to say that one economic or political system, however cruel and despotic, is less rational than another.”

This modern dilemma of relativization and objectivity had a lasting influence on the theoretical development of the concept of ideology. When critical theory took on the concept during the crisis of Marxism, it found itself confronted with the sociology of knowledge of Karl Mannheim, who ultimately wanted every intellectual connection to be understood as an ideology. In post-war France, Louis Althusser tried to expand Marxism into state theory and, at the end of the 1960s, placed the concept of ideology at the center of the state machine for reproducing the relations of production.

However, this resulted in a theoretical development by his students, who either declared ideology as useless (Michel Foucault) or as a description of every sign system (Jacques Derrida) – which ultimately also led to the short conclusion that ideology could only be everything or nothing. Ernesto Laclau’s and Chantal Mouffe’s post-Marxism generalized ideology in the theoretical program of a “deconstruction of Marxism” also goes from a special case to a fundamental model of consciousness-raising. And finally, with the aforementioned “end of history,” poststructuralist theory came up with the idea that the concept of ideology could only be saved in this way: as the general construction logic of the social.

A determination problem

But if everything is ideology, then strictly speaking the term is not even needed, at least not for a critical claim. However, such an abstract farewell could be countered with a materialistic principle: the truth, which here becomes a philosophical puzzle, means social objectivity, i.e. the real state of conditions. The addition “necessary” refers to the fact that the wrongness of thinking has an objective cause. This in turn directly leads to the subsequent problem of what the relationship between thought and society should look like. If we understand “necessary” in the sense of “compelling,” society determines the form and content of thinking. This idea was rightly rejected as bad determinism.

However, it makes more sense to interpret “necessary” in the sense of a function: in order to continue to exist, social conditions require a way of thinking that cannot properly understand them. In his famous definition of ideology, Althusser pointed out that the reproduction of production relations is also mediated by a consciousness that necessarily misrecognizes the whole thing: by “proving that it is so must“so that things are as they should be.” Althusser cites the formula “Amen” as an example from religion – the original form of ideology, so to speak.

Aside from religion, a classic example of such thinking is that of naturalness. Wherever “natural” appears as a justification in modern society, there is actually always ideology behind it. Naturalness is a retrospective naturalization, i.e. reification of man-made conditions. From this circumstance, Marx explicitly drew the conclusion in his programmatic Feuerbach theses: “All mysteries that cause theory to become mysticism find their rational solution in human practice.”

A way of thinking that does not find this rational solution turns into ideology – including Feuerbach’s. Because he had critically recognized that the world was, so to speak, doubling in people’s consciousness and that thinking therefore had to be returned to its worldliness. What Feuerbach, according to Marx, did not take into account was that the fact “that the worldly basis stands out from itself and an independent empire fixes itself in the clouds” itself represents a social fact that “only arises from self-tornness and… “is to be explained by the self-contradiction of this worldly basis”. Consequently, it is not enough to abstractly assert the alienation of thought and the world. Your own thinking must be able to explain itself as part of this turmoil, otherwise it will remain an unconscious product of these conditions, i.e. ideology.

A totality problem

The absence of the concept of ideology can therefore no more be explained by the often lamented ambiguity of the concept between analysis and the concept of struggle than by the philosophical difficulties of a concept of truth. Rather, the arbitrariness of the understanding of ideology is itself a phenomenon that needs to be explained; it points to the actual problem: meaningful talk of ideology presupposes an understanding of society as a whole, i.e. a concept of totality.

This is actually a sore point for the social sciences. The possibility of such a universal social theory has been systematically disputed in recent decades. The functionally differentiated modern society was therefore considered too complex to be reduced to a simple concept or context. Poststructuralist social ontologies assumed the indeterminacy of the social and therefore no longer wanted to speak of society in the singular. In social philosophy, the adoption of the idea of ​​a social totality was greeted with relief.

However radically contemporary critical theories have gotten rid of the concept of totality, they have not been able to resolve the associated problem of civil society still functioning as a justifiable, purposeful context of power. For several years now, the “big questions” have been returning to theory: class theory is in a revival in search of the determining structure of society, the new edition of the analyzes of authoritarianism asks about the social causes of the “shift to the right” and sociology up to social philosophy, the return of a social theory is called for.

However, this return is more likely to be another cycle of innovation in academia after the theories of social indeterminacy have been exhausted. Otherwise, one would have to provide information about what has changed in the social conditions that previously made knowledge of totality impossible but now push for its fulfillment. The good news is: in the line of materialist theory from Marx through critical theory to Louis Althusser, the criticism of the false consciousness of the social whole was the starting point in order to make any knowledge of society possible at all. There is all sorts of material available for such an undertaking.