Tgk1946's Blog

From Alien Powers (Kenneth Minogue, 1985) pp70-3

An ideological theory is the revelation that we live within a structure, and our common-sense conviction of freedom is revealed to be an illusion, for both what we do and what we think are actually determined by the structure. This is the great secret of an ideological explanation, and its recognition allows us, rather like the prisoner in Plato’s cave, to begin our first tottering steps towards the sunlight of reality, thus leaving behind many of our fellows (including the liberal intellectual mentioned earlier) still bewitched by the shadows on the wall cast by capitalism, patriarchy, imperialism and the other structures.

Ideological explanation thus consists in a game of ‘hunt the structure’. In the case of Marxism, we are instructed to attend to how human beings produce what they need, and to follow out the question of who gets what, and by what means, out of the productive process. In the case of feminism, it is the structure of sexual relations which is the key to wider things, and race, culture and the distinction between the city and the countryside can all generate structures of domination, though structures of more restricted scope than Marxism.

There are two related reasons why other ideologies are more limited than Marxism. One is that their key categories tend to be based on natural characteristics, like race or sex. The second is that these categories, precisely because they are thus limited, cannot penetrate into the farther reaches of social activity. Everything can with some plausibility be seen as part of the productive process. Race and sex are merely static attributes. By contrast, the analysis of the structure called ‘capitalism’ turns out to be the key to our working lives, to our social institutions, to the form of civilization, to family life and to art and literature. Everything reflects the structure. Once this has been demonstrated, nothing remains for an ideological explanation to do. The problem, of course, is to work out the type of reflection, for the world resembles those fairgrounds in which some mirrors seem to reproduce what we see but others lengthen, shorten, or otherwise distort the things they reflect.

In Marx’s thought, the five basic structures listed in the Preface constitute man’s voyage from primitive communism to the present stage of capitalism. So far as the modern world is concerned, what we experience every day of our lives is explicable in terms of the bourgeois relations of production to whose elaboration Marx devoted most of his intellectual life. To put it with a brutal simplicity as often used by Marxists as it is repudiated in Marxist intellectual work, it is capitalism which causes the rapacity of merchants, the claustrophobia of the nuclear family, the emergence of the novel, the maximum security prison, depressions and the gap between rich and poor. And the explanatory relationship necessarily works both ways. It is facts about these phenomena which validate the unifying theory of capitalism, and it is capitalism in its turn which helps us to understand that these facts are not the contingent results of human folly and baseness, but the structural consequences of the way in which the mode of production develops.

In most causal explanation, the cause is, so to speak, distinguishable from the effect, as the fire is distinguishable from the pot of water which it causes to boil, or as the mass of the sun is distinguishable from the planets whose orbits it largely determines in a precisely calculable manner. But clearly ‘capitalism’ is not to be construed as an outside cause, like sunspots, of the kind of society we live in. The cause, capitalism, and the effect, the observable features of capitalist society, are the same thing, and the distinction must be made in terms of aspects of a complex whole. The unmistakable analogy is with an organism in which the parts function to facilitate the continuance and vitality of the whole. Hence Marxists face problems about the nature of the structure, the kind of causality involved, and whether Marxism ought or ought not to be construed as a type of functional, or technological, explanation.

Ideological explanation consists at its most basic in the simple postulation of a structural connexion. Thus we have already encountered Miss Brownmiller explaining the phenomena of rape in terms of the structure of patriarchy. Let us consider another everyday example, in which Sheldon S. Wolin takes as his problem what he construes as the apathy of voters in the 1980 Presidential election in the United States. In this election, only a little more than 50 per cent of those eligible to vote turned out. Professor Wolin explains that America has been evolving from a loose structure of government to ‘something like a state system’, and he then goes on to make his structural connection:

If we bear these tendencies in mind . . . the apathetic electorate ceases to be an anomaly and appears, instead, as a necessary condition for the legitimation of the state whose effectiveness would be impaired if the electorate were to be seized by an extended fit of participatory zeal. The state needs taxpayers and soldiers, not active citizens. It requires occasional citizens in order to lend plausibility to the fiction that the state is based upon democratic consent, and that its actions are therefore legitimate. But in a world of nuclear weapons, a rapidly changing international economy, and uncertain power relations throughout the world, the state must be free in order to act quickly and rationally. The unspoken assumption of its leaders is that it neither needs nor can it function with the uncertainties and divisions inherent in a democratic politics.7

The model of explanation here clearly takes off from a set of interesting features thought to characterize current society (apathy especially) and construes these as effects of , because functional to, an organic structure: to wit, a tightly organized and quickly responsive state which can also claim democratic legitimacy. And we can gain some understanding of what is striking about this explanation if we consider what the alternatives might be. The problem is, simply, that lots of Americans did not turn out to vote for a President in 1980. This is converted – and the conversion requires some striking leaps of interpretation – into a phenomenon described here as ‘the apathetic electorate’. The phenomenon thus packaged is briefly dangled before our eyes as an anomaly, and then robbed of this anomalous character by being subject to the nomos of Professor Wolin’s structure.

Journalists in training are often taught that talking of a glass of water as ‘half empty’ has a different impact from talking about it as ‘half full’. Similarly, one might well have started this enquiry from the fact that more than half the eligible voters turned up to vote. Even if one did start from the absentees, one does not have to take it for granted that there is but a single reason why these people did not turn up to vote, rather than a whole complex of reasons. And it is further striking that the attempt to explain this already packaged problem about why many Americans behaved in a particular way shows no concern for the most obvious of all procedures: namely, asking them for such reasons as they might have had. Were they too busy? Were they indifferent as between the two candidates likely to win? Were they confident of the wisdom of their fellow Americans? One might imagine a very large number of possible reasons. Instead of bothering with these questions, Professor Wolin quickly shifts us to ‘the apathetic electorate’, which conveys a picture of hopeless zombies shuffling around before the television set incapable of summoning up the energy even to go out and cast a vote. And then he reveals to us that such behaviour, far from being mysterious, is functional, if we take certain structural developments in American society into account.

Functions increase the stakes of interpretation. Instead of the muddle of cross-purposes which normally compose political life, we have a clear and distinct mechanical relationship which brings a simple intelligibility to an otherwise confused field of enquiry. But there is a price: a devastation of the human world. This happens because a functional explanation is directly competitive with a rational one. When people are transformed into functions, they lose their personhood.