From Alien Powers (Kenneth Minogue, 1985) pp48-50
Marx and Engels argued that all modern social relations were exploitative, and the Communist Manifesto reviews the main institutions of society in these terms. The bourgeoisie it was argued, had ‘resolved personal worth into exchange value’. What, we might wonder, would such an opinion do with cases of ordinary kindness between ‘bourgeois’? The answer is that such exceptional cases (as they would be construed) cannot invalidate the characterization of an entire system. Broad generalizations need not be embarrassed by exceptions, but ideological theories do not generalize; they discover models. Marx and Engels were engaged in characterizing the system referred to in the Manifesto as ‘bourgeois society”, and it needs a great deal of dialectic to get this system into any coherent relation with the world we actually live in.
The same cannot be said of all ideological criticism. Consider the thought of the communists taking over the Chinese countryside in the 1940s:
The open oppression of some landlords was . . . cruel and Vicious. Everyone could see that . . . and oppose it. But the jan po hsueh, the hidden exploitation. of the average landlord, the exploitation inherent in land rent itself had to be pointed out and exposed, for was it not the root of all the other evils’?
The very term ‘landlord’ in this type of argument clearly swings on its hinges, from a concept understood in terms of theories of land rent and surplus towards the concrete reality of this or that landlord in the countryside. Open oppression is taken to confirm this understanding of the concept of landlord, whereas the behaviour of non-oppressive and possibly considerate landlords is ruled out as evidence bearing upon the issue. The fundamental assumption here is that reality depends on the concept, a proposition which, as the basis of practice, puts a great deal of weight upon our confidence in getting the analysis right. It is a form of reasoning which cannot deal with such practical questions as whether, on getting rid of the landlord, we may not find ourselves in the grip of even worse powers. Practical questions of better and worse ways of arranging life are made to depend upon speculative reasoning.
A similar conceptual move from genus to species will be found in many of the familiar ideological propositions. Proudhon’s jeu d’esprit to the effect that property is theft states precisely what many socialist critics of society from Babeuf onward have believed.22 Saint-Simon, rather more alarmingly, held the view that idleness was theft,23 and was by no means alone in conceiving a better society as if it were a factory in which we must all work. Sometimes the generic use of species in constructing the ideological system operates by identifying some necessary element of an activity with a specific and arguable influence upon it, as when the simple fact that to report news must involve selecting items from an infinite array of possibilities is identified with the arguable practice of censoring what people may be allowed to know. The result is to construe journalism as a conspiracy to suppress the facts:
Communicative power is about the right to define and demarcate situations. When we look at cultural power in this context, we mean the power to typify, transmit, and define the ‘normal’, to set agendas. The power is used to reproduce highly selected events, and to manufacture news as if these events were the centrally important events of that day. In short, one must see the news as reflecting not the events of the world ‘out there”, but as the manifestation of the collective cultural codes of those employed to do this selective and judgmental work for society.
It would be difficult to sustain this melodramatic characterization of the concept of communicative power (events, for example, are not just selected but ‘highly’ selected) if a population of passive consumers were not being postulated. The more sophisticated versions of this type of enquiry are simultaneously concerned to distance themselves from a conspiratorial explanation of what they think they have found, but at the same time they seek (in the metaphor of the blurb of this particular book) to ‘explode‘ the illusion that television news is more objective than that of the newspaper, and they start with a passionate premise. ‘Of course,’ writes Richard Hoggart, ‘what they call “the news” is biased; or, if that seems too loaded a word, artificially shaped.” Hoggart himself is aware of the equivocation involved in talking about the selection of news: it is unavoidable in practice, but the moment it is emphasized, it begins to suggest that selection is the exercise of power. whereupon selection slides into ‘bias’. The transmission of news is undoubtedly a power; but it is also a job, a duty, a subject of discussion, the provision of a service, an opportunity to satisfy people‘s curiosity, and much else. The ideological criticism operates by focusing attention upon the one aspect of power, thus conveying (in spite of some attention to audience response) that consumers of news are victims of that power. This assumption of passivity is the counterpart of the premise already mentioned: ideological criticism rejects the moral stance as unreal. For ideology is the doctrine that we are the structure in which we are enmeshed.
There can be no doubt that criticism of society couched in a language of philosophical fundamentalism is intellectually more impressive than the rough expedients of the politicians. Such fundamentalism serves, indeed, the rhetorical function of shocking people into taking a new view of things. The central ideological argument about oppression is clearly an adaptation of the modern rhetoric of liberty, and consists in the discovery of concealed forms of slavery. The world on which ideology first burst was one self-conscious about its achievements in extending freedom. It was in the process of abolishing slavery throughout the world. and had recently been taught by Hegel that in the modern world all are free. It is not difficult to imagine, therefore, the shock that people might sustain who, having been persuaded that they stood on an escalator of progress, were now told that most of them were still, in fact, nothing better than slaves.
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