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Ideology and cultureRoger Griffinaa Department of History, Oxford Brookes University,

To cite this Article Griffin, Roger(2006) 'Ideology and culture', Journal of Political Ideologies, 11: 1, 77 99To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/13569310500395974URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569310500395974

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Ideology and cultureROGER GRIFFIN

Department of History, Oxford Brookes University

ABSTRACT Finding a pragmatic exit from the semantic labyrinth surroundingideology and culture, this article considers the neutral connotations ofideology as a formative, intrinsically paradoxical, constituent of culture, andargues that the heterogeneous, volatile, and contested nature of all ideologieswhen viewed through some postmodernist lenses is their hallmark only under thehistorically exceptional societal conditions of high modernity. It moves on toconsider the virtues of several non-reductionist variants of Marxist theory thatpostulate a subtle dialectic between ideologys coercive and emancipatoryfunctions, aspects that can be seen at work at the generative and experiential coreof all human cultures, and not just capitalist ones. These reflections lead to a callfor a dialectical, anthropologically informed approach to the interface between

culture and ideology. It concludes on a speculative note by suggesting thatanalogies made between ideological self-replication in cultural processes and thegenetic basis of evolution could be more than metaphorical should the infantscience of memetics prove to have an empirically sound base.

Without contraries is no progression.William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Defining ideology and culture (or Snark-hunting for beginners)

When Raymond Williams observed in his Keywords that Culture is one of the twoor three most complicated words in the English language he omitted to enlightenhis reader as to what other(s) he had in mind, but ideology would certainlyhave fitted the bill.1 One obvious property that the two terms under examination inthis article share is their unusually polysemic nature, one which makes the

Correspondence Address: Roger Griffin, Department of History, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, OX30BP, UK.

Journal of Political Ideologies (February 2006),11(1), 7799

ISSN 1356-9317 print; ISSN 1469-9613 online/06/01007799 q 2006 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/13569310500395974


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lexicographers task less like pinning down their established varieties of meaningin an entomologists display case, than flailing around to catch some of them in abutterfly net while they swarm round his head.

In their pioneering taxonomic investigation of the term culture carried out inthe early 1950s, A. Kroeber and C. Kluckhohn identified 164 species of meaning(many of them closely related, of course) inhabiting the anthropological andsociological literature of the day.2 Three decades later Malcolm Hamiltonattempted to combat the conceptual anarchy surrounding ideology, a term heconsidered too often used in an excessively value-laden manner such thatpropositions that ought to be established empirically are implied or prejudgedby the definition of the phenomenon under investigation3a remark entirely

applicable to culture as well. To carry out this cull of redundant meanings hecombed through 85 academic sources and was able to identify 27 recurrentdefinitional components. These he then whittled down to size by deliberately(though somewhat arbitrarily) eliminating Marxist, totalizing, and psychodynamicconnotations to produce a highly condensed synthetic definition. Were suchexpeditions into the dense semantic thicket that has grown up around both terms tobe repeated now, they would doubtless be confronted by an even greater bio-diversity from which to harvest their samples.

Further reflection on the task this article has undertaken of providing a roughguide to how the two terms relate soon reveals an added dimension of difficultyin comparison with analyses of other multivalent social scientific concepts (e.g.revolution, society): the very act of embarking on it poses an acute form ofthe cognitive dilemma for which Douglas Hofstadter coined the term strange

loop in his Pulitzer Prize winning Godel, Escher, Bach.4 Just as anyconceptualization of ideology, however seemingly objective the academicregister and impeccable the scholarly apparatus employed, is inevitablyconditioned by the authors own ideology, so any analysis of culture is shapedby largely subliminal culture-specific and culturally conditioned processes. Inboth cases personal and supra-personal processes of cognition, construction, andimagining5 are involved into which even the most methodologically self-awareresearcher can have but limited introspection. As a result, only the moreconceptually challenged academic would venture into this highly contestedproblematic without a healthy respect for its intrinsic complexity. A few hoursspent disentangling the main strands of connotations they have acquired insecondary literature is liable to induce that sense of intellectual cul-de-sac andbewilderment that Socratic philosophy termed aporia (literally no way out),but that in the postmodern context does not necessarily serve as the prelude toillumination that Greek philosophy envisaged.

Despite such forebodings, the advice which Chris Barker offers in his influentialCultural Studies: Its Theory and Practice suggests a refreshingly down-to-earthapproach to negotiating, or rather forcibly breaking out, of the semantic maze thatsurrounds these terms when approached simply as objects of contemplation.He advocates a stance that allows us to confront such elusive concepts withoutbeing overawed by a sense of the infinite regression of a definitive meaning

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reminiscent of the futile chase depicted in Lewis Carrolls poem The Hunting ofthe Snark:6

There is no one single, correct definition of culture: Culture is not out there waiting to becorrectly described by theorists who keep getting it wrong. Rather, the concept of culture is atool which is of more or less usefulness to us as a life form. Consequently, its usage andmeanings continue to change as thinkers have hoped to do different things with it. Weshould ask not what culture is, but how the language of culture is used and for whatpurposes.7

Hamilton offers an observation in the course of defining ideology that can beconstrued in a similarly common sense spirit: How one categorizes realitydepends on ones purposes, the questions one asks about it, and often priordispositions and commitments to particular explanations of it.8

Such pragmatism in approaching thorny definitional problems (which isreminiscent of Albert Einsteins concept of the operational definition in physics)makes it possible to provide a succinct yet objective account of the relationshipbetween ideology and culture to be translated into a less daunting, moremodest, and hopefully more useful undertaking. This is to identify, within thespecific context of a multidisciplinary symposium on ideologys relationship withneighbouring concepts, some of the particular meanings that ideology acquiresas a heuristic device when associated with the investigation of culture. Or inBourdieuian terms, to ask what special connotations ideology has come toassume within the increasingly powerful field of cultural production that hasformed around the concept of culture itself within the Western (in this case

Anglophone) human sciences.9

Accordingly, this article will focus first on the waythe terms converge in their positive, or at least neutral, sense as a definitionalproperty of human society and its evolution, and then how they also have come tobe used almost synonymously in some areas of political theory as exclusivelynegative terms to describe the coercive, legitimizing function of thought in a statesystem based on alienation and oppression. This will clear the way for the positiveand negative connotations to be transcended, at least in principle, dialectically in asynthesis that emphasizes both the constraining and emancipating potential ofcultural production and of the ideology (and perhaps even the physiology) thatunderpins it.

A working definition of ideology in the context of culture

The basis of the convergence between the pair of terms under examination is thatthey both embrace non-material aspects of human existence relating to thesubjective realm of ideas, values, world-views, and cosmologies, the very stuff ofhuman history. Just how closely the two terms can seem symbiotically aligned isevident from the syncretic definition of culture offered by Kloeber and Kluckhohnon the basis of their exhaustive investigation into how social scientists actually hadbeen using it between the early 1930s and the late 1940s. The allusion to a culturalessence betrays the fact that their research was carried out in blissful ignorance

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of the post-structural and post-modern paradigms that would later emphasize thenon-essential, constructed nature of both culture and all academic interpretationsof it. Nonetheless, their proposed syncretic definition in some senses adumbrateseven these later developments:

Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behaviour acquired andtransmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups,including their embodiments in artefacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional(i.e. historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; culturalsystems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other asconditioning elements of further action.10

The assumption that traditional ideas and attached values lie at the core ofculture summons up the term ideology, as does the notion that cultural systemsare conditioned by past action and condition future action (as long as it isaccepted that action in this context is always ideologically motivated orrationalized).

Similarly, the first part of the synthetic definition that Hamilton managed to distilfrom the alembic of his lexicographical experiment with ideology is that it is asystem of collectively held normative and reputedly factual ideas and beliefs andattitudes advocating a particular pattern of social relations and arrangements,which surely goes for culture too.11 An initial objection might be that such anapproach confines ideology to a verbal realm that precludes considering its widersemiotic, ritual, artistic, technological, and material expression in external reality,and which by default become the exclusive domain of culture. However, one

expert in this area, Raymond Geuss, stresses that ideology too contains bothdiscursive elements such as concepts, ideas, beliefs, and non-discursiveelements, namely characteristic gestures, rituals, attitudes, forms of artisticactivity, etc..12 As such ideology, at least in what he terms this purely descriptivesense, refers simply to one of the parts into which the socio-cultural system of ahuman group can be divided for convenient study, so that ideology is treated as auniversal aspect of human society to be taken into account in the empirical study ofhuman groups, which can also be called anthropology.13

By following through the logic of this universalizing anthropologicalapproach to ideology it becomes possible to see it as a latent aspect of all humancultural activity and its material products, though one which only becomesapparent when a particular heuristic perspective is applied to it, rather in the waylight behaves with the properties either of a wave or of a beam according to the

experiment in particle physics to which it is submitted. Phenomenologicallyhuman existence is lived out and experienced non-ideologically, but onceexternalized in semiotic or material culture it immediately assumes an ideologicaldimension when any of its products are considered from an outsider perspective interms of their function in maintaining or challenging the social, economic, orpolitical status quo. At an individual level ideology is thus an integral part of theinstinctive human drive to plan, rationalize, and legitimise action or behaviour,whether as a self-aware protagonist of major historical transformations or as the

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un-self-conscious actor in the intimate daily drama of perpetuating a familiardomestic routine.

This construct is entirely compatible with the phrase completing Hamiltonsone-sentence definition of ideology cited earlier, which specifies that it is aimed at

justifying a particular pattern of conduct, which its proponents seek to promote,realize, pursue, or maintain. Once this stress on the role played by deliberate aims(whether conservative or revolutionary, cynical or idealistic) as a constituent ofideology is replaced by the idea of its conscious or unconscious function, then thecraggy contours of an ideal type of ideology as a cultural construct, one which givesit an elective affinity with culture, start to loom out of the fog on the following lines:

Ideology is a relatively cohesive, dynamically evolving, set of collectively held ideas orbeliefs, whether expressed verbally or in some other semiotic, performative, ritual, artistic,or behavioural form, when considered in their function either of reinforcing, or ofchallenging, existing social, political, economic, aesthetic, technological praxis in aparticular society and the dominant values and cosmology that sustain it. Ideologys mainsocio-psychological function on an individual level is thus the normative one of endowinghuman beings with a sense of identity, purpose, and reality, and of enabling them to beconvinced of the self-evident justification and normality of their actions, despiteconsiderations apparent to external observers that may show these to be illusory,subjective, or generated by psychological drives, material interests, or supra-individual(historical) factors. As such ideology is an integral and constitutive aspect of all humanculture, and is endowed with the paradoxical quality of being, according to specific contexts,either replicatory and coercive, or innovative and emancipatory. It hence plays a primary roleboth in social conditioning, acculturation, and the perpetuation of the past through tradition,and in the generation and implementation of revolutionary, future-oriented projects for thecreation of radically new situations.

The deeper implications of the last part of this definition should become clearer indue course. The main thrust of the first part is that all human culture has anideological dimension, but only when considered under the aspect of ideology , inmuch the same way as everything is political, and (pace Margaret Thatcher)everything is social when considered from the perspective of politics orsociology. It follows from this that social activities (playing football, teachingyoga, making pasta) and cultural artefacts (toys, love songs, Renaissancepaintings) can all be treated as having an ideological dimension without beingreduced essentialistically to their function of deceiving, mystifying, andmanipulating reality to the benefit of unseen interested parties or institutionalforces. Even the pronouncements of totalitarian leaders can be treated as reflecting

genuine beliefs, and having an ideological, culture-constitutive dimension withoutdenying that their ideas, once expressed in speeches, directives, and newspaperarticles serve the purposes of cynical propaganda and mass-manipulation.

Culture after the cultural turn

Approached as an ever present, immanent aspect of all human culture, ideologythus partakes of its paradoxical, Janus-headed qualities by manifesting itself both


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individually and collectively, and by being experienced as real and naturalwhen lived out existentially and subjectively, but constructed and artificial ininterpretations of it carried out by historians and social scientists. The latter,however much recourse they make to methodological empathy, necessarilyadopt the objectifying standpoint of an outsider to the experience itself.14 Bothculture and ideology are thus simultaneously authentic and inauthentic, solidlyconcrete and diaphanously insubstantial. As one political scientist put it:

Things that appear to be most natural to human societymarket economies, the state, thenation, society itselfare historical constructions made by human actors who in turn arereconstituted by the very products of their making.15

The significance of this assertion assumes its full weight in the context of theargument being developed here when it is realized that it was made by RonaldGrigor Suny, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, whospecializes in the politics of national and ethnic identity within the context of theSoviet Empire and the aftermath of its collapse. The essay from which it is takenpays eloquent tribute to the way the cultural turn in the social sciences providesheuristic strategies for understanding events generated by nationalism markedlysuperior to those delivered by conventional materialistic Marxism, byhistoriography that clings to essentialist or objectivist fallacies about reality, orby rational choice theory. Sunys article is also a thinly veiled indictment ofcontemporary political science (at least in the US) which he maintains has hardlybeen touched by the cultural turn, and hence remains largely impervious to itsinfluence, barred from accessing the profound insights that it affords into the

dynamics of political processes and institutions. As a result there is at presentamong political scientists no consensus on whether culture is just a piece ofinformation to be considered or an independent explanatory variable.16

Suny traces the cultural turn in the social sciences to the combined impact ofseveral major figures, such as E. P. Thompson, Louis Althusser, and MichelFoucault, as well as to the wider influence of the intellectual climate ofpoststructuralism and postmodernism, and the parallel linguistic and historicalturns occurring in neighbouring disciplines. He suggests its basic insight isepitomized in a statement made by Clifford Geertz: Believing, with Max Weber,that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I takeculture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimentalscience in search of laws, but an interpretive one in search of meaning.17 Underthe influence of this type of anthropological, semiotic, and ontological conception

of culture, Suny argues that Culturalists deeply suspect hard, fixed, essentialsocial categories (class, nation, gender), and propose considering a more radicalunderstanding of identities as fluid, fragmented, and constantly in need of hardwork to sustain.18 The profound implications of this premise for theunderstanding of ideology by political scientists can be inferred from the stresshe proceeds to place on the way the cultural turn underlines the importance ofrealizing that the primary function of language is no longer merely expressiveof reality but constitutive of it:

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Culturalists contend that a large part of politics is the struggle over meaning and the right tobe authorized to speak. For culturalists language not only expresses but constitutes thepolitical world. Derived from neither social position nor ideology, language itself helps toshape perception of position, interests, ideologies, and the meanings attached to the socialand political world. Interests and identities, even what might constitute strategic choices, arethemselves part of a political process of constructing meanings.19

Ideology can thus be seen from this perspective as both cultural product andproducer, as cultural construct and as a constitutive element in the formation ofculture, a phenomenon whose salient property in the human context is that itconstantly reproduces itself without ever perfectly replicating itself. It isprecisely thanks to this imperfect copying process that human culture is able to

adapt, innovate, and develop in a way that mirrors the genetic processes at theheart of an evolutionary process based on natural selection.20 Ideologysrelationship to culture thus poses yet another example of the chicken and eggconundrum that constantly confronts contemporary life and human scientists intheir quest to understand the genesis, evolutionary, and self-duplicating processesthat make both biological evolution and societal change possible. As a result,non-fundamentalist dialects of the cultural turn can encourage a dynamic conceptof historical and political realities and the ideologies that articulate and shapethem as a process of constant flux and morphological adaptation.21 This not onlysubverts any master narratives used to describe them, but precludes (closesoff) the possibility of explanatory closure. Suny cites approvingly thepronouncement of two ethnographically trained culturalists that, culture is notan object to be described, neither is it a unified corpus of symbols and meanings

that can be definitively interpreted. Culture is contested, temporal, andemergent.22

Modernity as the break-down of a totalizing culture

However, before political scientists heads are turned by the cultural turn, theyshould be on their guard against the tendency it encourages to characterize cultureas if the social realities that constitute it are like endlessly perambulating dunesand treacherous quicksands, for ever generating ideological tensions that denyfinal resolution. It may well be that the stress this approach places on culturesdynamic polymorphism is itself culturally over-determined. William Sewell,for example, in his attempt to move beyond the cultural turn, claims that allcultures are contradictory, [. . .] loosely integrated, [. . .] contested, [. . .] subject toconstant change [

. . .

and] weakly bounded.23 In response Patrick Brantlingerintroduces an important caveat when he points out that while this is certainly thecase with both modern and now postmodern cultures, [. . .] Sewell draws no linebetween primitive and civilized cultures.24

What Brantlinger is alluding here to is the impressive evidence accumulated bycomparative cultural anthropology over the last two centuries suggesting that ourBlue Planet was once home to innumerable social systems as heterogeneous as


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human languages, at least until they were transformed or eradicated by exposure tothe increasingly globalizing forces of modernity in their various permutations(European colonial, Western, American, capitalist, Soviet or Chinesecommunist, Japanese imperial, etc.). What these traditional or pre-modernsocieties had in common was that all aspects of human life within them werebound together by a traditional and communal (though often richly variegated andnever entirely static) metaphysical cosmology (religion) and correspondingritual. Both of these were in turn inextricably integral to social praxis, namely thetransmittable and evolving technologies of economic, material, and spiritual(psychological) survival which underpinned the cohesion and sustainability of thesocial system. In these tradition-based worlds, what Marx called in the opening

pages of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon the poetry of the futurewhich fuels projects of radical social transformation and emancipation fromtradition was literally inconceivable.

This is not to imply that premodern societies were static. Several classicalcivilizations underwent sustained periods of seismic transformation in theircosmology and technology, notably in what has come to be known (after KarlJaspers concept of the Achsenzeit) the Axial Age around 500 BC. Yet in everycase a new, relatively homogeneous social system and cosmological traditioneventually emerged to replace the former one, avoiding the fate of ideologicalfragmentation and hypertrophy, radical secularization, and perpetuated liminalitythat characterizes the modern West.25 In his concept of the megamachine, firstexpounded in his Technics and Civilization (1934), Lewis Mumford offered apowerful metaphor for the ability of social systems underpinned by elaborate

cosmologies to exercise a totalizing sway over society, making possible the vastachievements of cultural production and collective organization that characterizethe major civilizations of European, Middle Eastern, Asian and Central Americanantiquity. However, if Egyptian, Aztec, or even Western Medieval civilizationsare contrasted with High Renaissance society, it is tempting to see Westernmodernity in terms of the accelerating breakdown and dysfunction of themegamachine of Catholic Christianity and of the relative cultural homogeneitythat accompanied it. It was this unique metamorphosis in human culture that ledMumford after 1945 to focus his attention on the need for another transformationof man if long-term disaster was to be avoid.26

One play that dramatizes a symbolically important moment in that protractedprocess of fragmentation is Bertolt BrechtsLife of Galileo (1938). In it the Churchis portrayed as threatening the scientist with torture in order to delay the growingschism between Faith and Reason driven by the progress of empirically basedastronomy. Brecht thereby intended to expose both the profound ideologicaldimension latent not just in institutional religion, but in the natural sciences and inthe cosmology that underpins both of them, as well as the ideological implicationsof pure science for perpetuating the mystification of prevailing power relations.An extended essay in intellectual history that chimes in with this perspective is theone on The Decay of Values that Hermann Broch interpolates into his novelThe Sleepwalkers (1932). An anatomical study of the deepening spiritual crisis of

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the European society, the trilogy traces the breakdown of the relative homogeneityand integrity of Europe as long as it was dominated in the West by the relativecohesive theology of Catholic Christian theology. It describes the Renaissance asthat criminal and rebellious age. [. . .] in which the Christian scheme of values wasbroken in two halves [. . .] that age in which with the falling asunder of themedieval organon, a process of dissolution destined to go on for five centuries wasinaugurated and the seeds of the modern world planted.27 Broch thus equates therise of secular modernity with a process of fragmentation (de-centring,deracination, disembedding) which leads to a proliferation of competing logics.These offer a temporary but inherently unstable and ultimately soul destroyingrefuge for modern human beings, each one of which is helplessly caught in the

mechanism of autonomous value-systems, forced, no matter how romanticallyand sentimentally he [sic] may yearn to return to the fold of faith, to become aspecialist, eaten up by the radical logic of the value into whose jaws he hasfallen.28

The logical endpoint of this process is the radically disenchanted experience ofthe world (which in turn spawns myriad projects for its re-enchantment) that MaxWeber had articulated some three decades before Brochs novel when he wrotethat culture can be regarded as a finite segment of the meaningless infinity of theworld process, a segment on which human beings confer meaning.29 Once asociety, already shaped or misshapen by the value-eroding and ideology-proliferating impact of modernity then enters an objective (socio-economic/-political) crisis of the sort that occurred in the final years of the Weimar Republic,millions of ordinary people can collectively enter the disorienting world of

ideological flux and mirages that Sewell equates with culture tout court. At thatpoint it may, as the meteoric rise of Hitler illustrates, unleash their instinctivemythopoeic drive to impose meaning on the void that is opening up, turningsociety into an incubator for totalizing visions of renewal, and for apocalypticfantasies of participating in the foundation of a new historical era.

The concern with culture as a symptom of cultural crisis

Such ideological tornados are, however, still the exception rather than the ruleeven in modernity. Once we focus on the atypicality, at least as far as the longueduree of human history is concerned, of our increasingly globalized Westernmodernity with respect to premodern (traditional, primitive) societies, a freshperspective emerges on the relationship between ideology and culture. Outside theperiods of transition that characterized the axial age of the major civilizations ofthe past, it seems clear that cultural production was channelled largely intoduplicating the past patterns of society and the cosmology that underpinned them.This did not preclude ideological conflicts or even major schisms within thedominant world-view, but meant that continuity and tradition still tended toprevail over alternative, revolutionary (e.g. millenaristic) schemes of history thatenvisaged linear progress, radical change, or the imminent realization of utopiannew eras. This held true even if seismic upheavals in the histories of individual


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civilizations or peoples enabled a rival cultural system to be installed as the officialworld view, as when the Roman Empire adopted Christianity or the Turks adoptedIslam.

In contrast, modernity has brought about the chronic cultural instabilitycaptured in Walter Benjamins image of the Storm of Progress, the hallmark ofwhich is that crisis has become a permanent status quo (thereby transforming theoriginal meaning of the term crisis). This in turn has proliferated new ways ofseeing and acting on the world with a view to bringing about its transformation,the aggregate effect of which has been to generate the welter of competing valuesystems, logics, and totalizing interpretations of reality collectively known underthe heading of aesthetic and political modernism.30 In this way modernity has

become the age of ideology, an era of overtly conflicting cosmologies and theconspicuous profusion of alternative perceptions of reality. These maketransparent (at least to political scientists in the role of professional outsiders)for all to see the constructed, and would-be constituent, dimension of ideology thattends to remain occulted in the social system of a primitive society.

Clearly, the interpretive schema sketched here bears the hallmarks of just the typeof master narrative that has become so anachronistic and taboo since the culturalturn. Yet if it can be tentatively accepted at least as a heuristic model, then it makessense to approach the emergence of so many powerful political ideologies in 19thcentury Europe, such as German nationalism,31 and their tendency to develop instressed historical conditions into fully fledged political religions,32 as theproducts of an ingrained societal need already alluded to, namely to generatecountervailing forces to combat the progressive disenchantment of the world. As an

atomized, personalized phenomenon this need may have become a defining trait ofmodern and postmodern culture, but not of human culture per se. It also becomesplausible to suggest that the sustained forensic concern with ideology manifested inThe Journal of Political Ideologies, and in the original Centre for PoliticalIdeologies symposium that was the starting point for this essay, is at some deepstructural level symptomatic of the ongoing, irresolvable ideological crisis thatcharacterizes modernity, and that is manifested in the endless profusion ofalternative constructions of realityi.e. ideologiesthat in their more overtlypolitical aspect are CPIs raison detre. In a parallel way the modern Westsobsessive preoccupation with cultural history is symptomatic of its freefall into theirresolvable crisis evoked by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy which has produceda culture unsatisfied by everything it devours, which transforms the most powerful,wholesome nourishment into history and criticism,33 leaving its inhabitantsstarved of metaphysical nourishment.

Ideology as cultural hegemony

Rather than pursue a line of inquiry that ultimately calls into question thenutritional value of a culture in which some intellectuals find it meaningful towrite articles on culture, it is perhaps best to backtrack, and to focus on ideologyand culture as divergent rather than convergent concepts. Their tendency to pull in

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different directions is reflected in their etymology. Whereas the relatively recentneologism ideology was born of Destutt de Tracys liberal project of applyingthe Enlightenment tradition of analysis to the scientific study and demystificationof ideas and systems of thought, culture boasts a much more illustriousetymological heritage which lends it connotations of healthy organic growth andgrandiose civilizing achievement.34 As a result the positive aura that ideology canacquire when associated with culture as a force for distinctively human realms ofachievement can easily give way to a negative one closer to the demystifyingthrust of its etymology. Thus, Raymond Geuss contrasts the descriptive uses ofthe term ideology with the distinctly pejorative meaning it acquires when used torefer to a form of consciousness which is delusional, or false, or rationalizes the

illegitimate domination of one class over another.35

The Marxist tradition of the social sciences is dominated by this negative use, acanonical example of which is found in Engels letter to Mehring of 1893 where hestates:

Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with afalse consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him; otherwise itwould not be an ideological process at all. Hence he imagines false or apparent motives.Because it is a process of thought, he derives both its form and its content from pure thought,either his own or that of his predecessors.

Engels proceeds to see the sphere of historical ideology that determines thecontents of false consciousness as comprising the political, juridical,philosophical, theologicalin short, all the spheres belonging to society and not

only to nature.36

The application of this premise to modern society under thedomination of capitalism quickly leads to the culture and ideology merging assynonyms for the conscious or unconscious manipulation of reality to the benefitof a tiny minority. Indeed, in the more economically determinist interpretations ofthe materialistic conception of history culture is relegated to being part of thesuperstructure, and hence a mere epiphenomenon of the socio-economic base.However, a number of major Marxist thinkers have attributed far greaterautonomy and importance to culture as a principal locus for the revolutionarystruggle, notably Raymond Williams, whose concern with revising the relegationof culture within traditional Marxism,37 as we noted earlier, exerted appreciableinfluence on the cultural turn. In this enterprise he had been anticipated by some ofthe later essays of none other than Lenin himself.38

However, as is known well beyond Marxist circles, the pioneer of this anti-

reductionist approach to culture was Antonio Gramsci, who made a decisive breakwith classical Marxism by conceptualizing the power of the capitalist system in itsvarious (liberal, Bonapartist, Fascist) permutations as being dependent on a blendof dominion (which involves a state apparatus of social control and coercion) andcultural hegemony. Though he was never in a position to resolve the ambiguitiesin his use of this term before his untimely death,39 it is clear from his prisonwritings that he saw the need to counteract the cultural hegemony of capitalism atthe level of ideas and valueshe did not apply ideology to the Marxist struggle


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since it clearly retained its connotations of false consciousness andmanipulationif the socialist struggle to transcend the capitalist phase ofhistorical development was to be successful. This was especially true in advanceddemocracies particularly where state power rested as much on a political cultureimpregnated with liberal, capitalist, and nationalist ideology (i.e. culturalhegemony), rather than on feudal power relations of despotic force andsubjugation (dominion).40

In short, from a Gramscian perspective modern political revolutions alwaysinvolve more than the deployment of violence against the established order:violence is never naked, but clothed in ideologies and values that made thetransformation conceivable in the first place. Gramsci would surely have warmed

to John Adams observation on the American Revolutionary War against Britishcolonial rule: The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. TheRevolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religioussentiments of their duties and obligations. This radical change in the principles,opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real AmericanRevolution.41 Similarly, the rapid overthrow of the ancien regime in the FrenchRevolution would have been impossible without the notably un-coordinated andun-concerted counter-hegemonic struggle of the philosophes at the level ofintellectual (and not even primarily political) culture, many of whom were anti-democratic thinkers. Even in Russia, where the traditions of feudal despotism werestill strong, the foundations of the Russian Revolution were laid in the diffusesubculture of counter-hegemonic political ideas constituted by the intelligentsiarather than in terrorist training camps.

The specularity/spectrality of capitalisms cultural hegemony

In the post-war period Louis Althusser built on Gramscis conceptual framework byassociating the perpetuation of capitalism with the dominance of whathe termed theIdeological State Apparatus (ISA) as opposed to the Repressive State Apparatus(RSA), at which point ideology and culture have come once again to resemble theinseparable twins familiar from non-Marxist culturalist discourse. The differenceis that they are now endowed with the malevolent power to substitute the overtdeployment of coercive state power with a covert normalization which, inAlthussers analysis, operates at a profound ontological level to ensure the collusionof the exploited in their own exploitation. Influenced by Lacans blend of Hegel andFreud in his structuralist analysis of how human beings acquire consciousness, hesaw a profound nexus between ideology and all human behaviour (i.e. culture inthe totalizing sense): There is no practice except by and in an ideology.42 Appliedto the Marxist analysis of modern capitalism, this premise leads to the insight that itreproduces itself not through a crude process of dominion and brainwashingimposed from above, but by a circular process in which the objective external world(i.e. of capitalist society)presented and experiencedas the ultimate reality or whatAlthusser calls the Absolute Subjectis shaped by ideas and values carried in theindividuals subjective inner world (constituted as subject). These ideas being in

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turn are conditioned by the prevailing material reality, while simultaneouslyunderpinning it.

The structure of all ideology produced by the States Ideological StateApparatus is thus what he terms speculary, in that it has a mirror-structure.Once experienced as normal, substantial, and real, a given socio-political orderfunctions as a total culture, and thus occupies the mythic Centre from which itcalls into being (interpellates) members of society in a double mirror-connexion. At this point, in Althussers cryptic formulation, it subjects thesubjects to the Subject, while reciprocally the Subject provides them with a deepsense of existential security and identity.43 At that point exploitation andalienation have become the ontological home that the members of capitalist

society carry on their backs like snails. Ideology and culture have fused andbecome coterminal. It is precisely this speculary quality of culture under acapitalist society that endows the Ideological State Apparatus with suchextraordinary mystifying power.

Despite the considerable sophistication with which Althusser re-imaginesideology in comparison with the more reductionist versions of the base/superstructure dualism encountered in classic Marxism, he arguably operates witha perspective on culture just as foreshortened and ethnocentric as that of manynon-Marxist culturalists. For example, his primary concern with offering a radicalcritique of contemporary capitalist modernity leads him to reduce the church andschool under capitalism to manifestations of Ideological State Mechanisms.44 Yethis own prolific and influential cultural production underscores the way capitalistsociety, far from being a latter-day totalitarian megamachine, hosts a plurality of

mental and institutional spaceshe himself was the product of the Ecole NormaleSuperieur and became one of its professorsin which the cultural hegemony of itssystem can be challenged, its mirrors smashed, and the spell of its ideologicalmatrix broken. The very existence of Althussers writings on ideology can be seenas a refutation of the theory they develop, just as Margaret Thatcherspronouncement that there is no such thing as society was a contradiction interms, since without society she would not have been able to formulate the thoughtbehind it, let alone communicate it verbally.

Even greater strides towards developing a sophisticated Marxist model of thecomplex relationship between ideology and culture have been made by JacquesDerrida, who ever since the 1960s has been honing the technique ofdeconstruction to produce tools of socio-political analysis more sophisticatedthan those based on the concept of mystification, alienation, or exploitationavailable to classic Marxism. It is a technique which in Spectres of Marx, writtenat the height of the ideological crisis of (Euro-)Marxist culture in the wake of theSoviet Empires dramatic collapse, he brings to bear on the language in whichMarx expounded his theory of the commodification of all products of humanlabour under capitalism.

Derrida reveals how central the metaphor of ghost and conjuring trick are toMarxs analysis of the surplus value they acquired, which he sees rooted in acomplex set of subliminal and essentially false metaphysical assumptions about


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reality. These combine to hold together and mystify the entire existing system ofproductive and property relations, as well as the social, economic, and politicalprocesses that underpin them. Not only are the foundations of the capitalist system,however solid, self-evident, and eternal they may seem, an illusion, but they arebased on a sustained act of illusionist magic. This gives capitalist society itsspectral quality, simultaneously real and incorporeal, so that the value of everyaspect of material existence within the cash nexus is somehow in the object butnot of the object.45

One implication of the spectrality of the material world within capitalist culture(though arguably any human society), is that the effect of pulling objects apartfrom the ideological matrices in which their social meaning and economic value

is embedded can be compared to an act of fission (my analogy not Derridas).This helps explain the powerful social energies released when this is donecollectively in a revolutionary moment in which an entire regime is suddenlystripped bare of its illusionist, magic powers. Bertolt Brecht hoped that his laterplays would trigger precisely such a radically demystifying and liberatingchain-reaction in their audiences, a negative epiphany in which modern capitalistculture was suddenly seen through, like the Wizard of Oz in the finale of theHollywood film, to reveal the levers, control panels, and warning lights ofcapitalism concealed behind the thick curtains that separate the exploiters fromthe exploited.

More recently the first episode of the film trilogy The Matrixa cinematicRohrschach test that allows those convinced of the essential unreality ofcontemporary modernity to see their own vision of a higher truth confirmed

could be read in both Althusserian and Derridaean terms as a lived allegory ofjust how substantial and real capitalist modernity is at a phenomenological levelto those born into the hegemonic system. It dramatizes the extreme difficulty ofbreaking capitalisms ideological mirrors and exorcizing its cultural ghosts toachieve, not just the theoretical knowledge of, but the physical experience of itsconspiratorial unreality. Even after Neo (Keanu Reeves) has chosen to take theRed Pill that will enable him to discover what the Matrix is rather than the BluePill that makes life go on unreflectingly as before, imaginary bullets still makehim bleed as long as he retains any vestige of reflexive belief in the collectivehallucination firing them. A moments distraction by a Woman in Red passing byin a crowd stops Neos initiation into deeper insight into the mechanics of culturein its tracks.46

In some respects seeking to probe into the relationship between ideology andculture is the academic equivalent of finding/manufacturing the Red Pill neededto break out of conventional common sense, or contradictory academic waysof seeing them. Once this threshold of self-reflexivity is reached, then it ispossible to move from passive descriptions of existing theories to activelyformulating a heuristic framework within which the relationship can usefully beinvestigated. This we propose to do by offering a synthesis of the main elementswe have plucked out from the oceanic secondary literature that exists on thesetopics.

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From the Janus-headed to the dialectical

The premise behind such a deliberate act of syncretism in a convoluted intellectualdebate is the dialectical one that it is possible to transcend dualisms and progressfrom position and counter-position to a fruitful area of convergence that isexperienced as higher because of its greater heuristic value. Once all notion ofessential definitions of either ideology or culture have been abandoned asreifications of particular constructs (ideal types), it is possible to see that the Janus-headed quality so widely recognized in the liberal human sciences actuallybetokens not irreconcilable contradictions, but the presence of a dialecticalrelationship. True to their roots in a Marxist tradition that stresses the importance

of dialectics, Gramsci, Althusser, and Derrida, whatever their differences, allrecognize the way both ideology and culture are able to act as complementary,interconnected historical forces which are, according to specific historicalcontexts, either negative or positive, either replicatory or innovatory, and henceeither repressive or emancipatory. It is a realization that for a revolutionarysocialist is integral to the process of raising consciousness to a point whereindividuals previously inveigled by capitalisms hegemony, trapped in its hall ofmirrors, and in thrall to the many forms of fetishism it induces can break out oftheir cultural conditioning and work for societys benign transformation. Theepiphanic moment this realization can induce is epitomized in William Blakesfamous (pre-Marxist) cry for liberation in Jerusalem (1804): I must create myown system or be enslaved by another mans.

Underlying this approach to the cultural aspect of ideology is a fundamental

ethological assumption about human nature, about how human beings as a speciesbehave in and interact with the natural world, namely that they are bothconditioned by it and yet are endowed with an extraordinary capacity for acting onand changing it for better or for worse. In the realm of ideology this ambivalencemanifests itself in a constant interplay between passive submission to and activecontestation of the world as it presents itself through linguistically mediatedthought. Indeed, Renate Holub has argued that what underpins the macro-logic ofGramscis belief in the possibility of revolutionary action to break out of theprevailing hegemony of capitalism is his keen interest in the micrological patternsthat inform the relationship of consciousness and desire, in particular in the waylanguage simultaneously enables and delimits the possibilities of freedom.

Language, in its form as a structure of values, and mediated by agents of the hegemonicclass, can keep the subaltern class in check. Yet subaltern classes can invent new structures

of value designed to subvert the hegemonic design. This invention is not only enabled by aninherent will to freedom, or, in the Blochian sense, by a principle of hope. For Gramsci, thisinvention of counter-hegemonies is in part contingent on the very structure of languageitself. 47

This passage alludes to another Marxist thinker whose work is illuminates thedialectical relation of ideology and culture. Ernst Bloch devoted Herculeanintellectual effort both to demystifying the prevailing hegemony of capitalism andNazism in his native Germany,48 and to exploring the possibilities of an


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ideological antidote to the forces of fanaticism and terror. The basis for this hefound in a faculty he termed the Not-Yet-Conscious that he considered as centralto the function of the human psyche as Freuds subconscious, and it is even moreconstituent of human history since it accounts for the perennial primacy of theprinciple of hope in shaping human society.49 On the basis of this conviction, asmuch ideological as anthropological, Bloch came to see the bulk of culturalproduction as irreducibly ambivalent. It consists of ideology in the negative sense,and hence expresses a false consciousness that serves to justify, mystify, andperpetuate the hegemonic system, yet at the same time is inextricably mixed inwith countervailing projections of alternative realities that point beyond thepresent towards a liberated future.

According to Douglas Kellner, Bloch therefore provides exciting methods ofcultural criticism, a new approach to cultural history, and novel perspectives onculture and ideology. In particular, he is more sophisticated than those whosimply denounce all ideology as false consciousness, or who stress the positivefeatures of socialist ideology. Rather, Bloch sees emancipatory-utopian elementsin all living ideologies, and deceptive and illusory qualities as well. It follows thatthe task of radical cultural criticism should be to analyse both the social hopes andfantasies in cultural artefacts, as well as the ideological ways in which fantasies arepresented, conflicts are resolved, and potentially disruptive hopes and anxieties aremanaged. It is a remit which embraces not just high culture but daydreams,popular literature, architecture, department store displays, sports, or clothing, aswell as Hollywood films, network television, or other forms of mass-mediatedculture.50

Towards an anthropological culturalism in ideology studies

By applying a dialectical view of culture which subsumes ideology, Marxists suchas Gramsci and Bloch point the way forward to resolving the sterile conflictbetween the polarized positions that often characterize the way they are currentlyconceptualized at present, such as those informed by the economic determinism ofthe more reductionist schools of Marxism or the absolute relativism of somedialects of liberal postmodern discourse theory. They also point to substrata ofhuman consciousness at work in the production of ideology which are not bound toany particular class or historical era, but are hardwired into human consciousness,and are thus the realm of the anthropologist rather than the political scientist. Thisleads us back by a different route to one of the points made by Geuss at the outsetof this article, which was the need to see culture and ideology as universalelements in the empirical study of human groups, that is anthropologically.

The dialectic which is unfolding, though not intrinsically Marxist, provides acontext which makes an anthropological approach entirely compatible both withthe demystifying thrust of the Marxist human sciences in their engagementwith culture, and with their concern with diagnosing aberrant episodes in thehistory of ideology so as to help prepare the way for alternative, more humanefutures. Thus, Marxist and liberal schools of thought themselves enter a dialectic

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relationship! It is perhaps useful at this point to summon up the spectre of Derrida.On Grammatology (1967) warns that the Western human sciences are dominatedby a logocentrism, which distorts our understanding of the relationship betweenwriting and speech, and which he traces to an ethnocentrism that attachesexcessive significance to the written word at the expense of other forms of humanself-expression.51 As he makes clear in his attack on the cultural hubris ofHegelian philosophy,52 Derrida is concerned to overcome in his own work one ofthe more serious repercussions of this ethnocentrism, namely that it encouragesWestern academics to devise universalizing, totalizing discourses about cultureand ideology in ways that, ironically, ignore the constructions of these topics innon-European cultures and hence the insights they might bring.53

One consequence of the continuing climate of logocentrism that Derridaexposes is the tendency to ignore the ideological importance of semiotic, butnon-verbal, behaviour that anthropologists are trained to decode and interpret.An example of this bias is the way historians of fascism, if they have concededthat it had an ideology at all, have in the past tended to look for empiricalevidence of its existence in the speeches and writings of leaders and ideologues,rather than in the lavish displays of symbols, rituals, and theatrical politicsassociated with particular movements. G. L. Mosses The Nationalization of theMasses (1975), largely ignored at the time of publication, is now widelyrecognized as a turning point in the maturing of fascist studies54 preciselybecause of the conscious use it made of a paradigm drawn from culturalanthropology to illuminate an important episode in the genesis of Nazism,namely the emergence in 19th century Germany of nationalism as a secular

religion with its own liturgy, cult, sacred spaces and sacral art.55 At about thesame time as Mosse underwent his own cultural turn, Emilio Gentile wasembarking on a long-term project of studying Fascism as a political religion,producing a steady flow of monographs and articles since the 1970s which haverevolutionized the historiographical understanding of the institutional andideological realities, policies, and actions of Mussolinis regime. In particular,he has almost single-handedly made it common sense to recognize that Fascismwas driven by the concerted attempt to sacralize national politics. As such it canbe seen as yet another permutation of the goal pursued by all totalitarianmovements and regimes to achieve a new type of cultural hegemony, not inorder to exercise power for its own sake, but to carry out an anthropologicalrevolution through the use of an essentially ritualistic and transformativeconception of politics.56 To divorce specimens of the regimes ideologicalproduction such as Mussolinis speeches from this political religion is to riskgravely misreading their historical significance (e.g. seeing in them no morethan expressions of Mussolinis megalomania).

A number of premodern phenomena that fall within the remit of culturalanthropology have considerable potential relevance to understanding theideological dynamics of modern totalitarian politics. Notable examples are thehuman need for delimiting sacred from profane experiences of time and space;57

the constitutive role played by ritual, cosmological myth, political liturgy, and


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collective ecstatic states in underpinning socio-political orders;58 the perennialhuman need to generate myths of spiritual rebirth and temporal renewal(palingenesis);59 and the central role played in all premodern communities byritual techniques for reversing the disenchantment of the world, the decay ofnature, and the entropy of cosmological time.60 One particularly fruitful areaof potential synergy between cultural anthropology and fascist studies relates tothe response of primitive societies to conjunctures of events (e.g. drought,territorial encroachment by other tribes) which cause the world to be experiencedas out of joint or descending into chaos. This may provoke an intensified bout ofritualistic activity in which the tribe or people symbolically re-centre (re-ground,re-root, re-embed) themselves in reality, and thereby ensure that the symbolic axis

of the world which has become dislodged once more runs through the heart (thesacred middle) of the life of the community.61

Studies of numerous examples of these revitalization movements such as theCheyenne Ghost Dance led two eminent anthropologists to conclude that they tendto emerge during epochs of marked cultural change and its accompanyingpersonal distress, and seek to revitalize a traditional institution, whileendeavouring to eliminate alien persons, customs, values, even material culturefrom the experience of those undergoing painful change.62 Significant features ofsuch movements are the forging of a new religion syncretized from existingelements of belief, the emergence of charismatic leaders, and the creation of ritualsdesigned to symbolically purify the new community and purge it of pollution.However, many insights are to be gleaned from conventional historiographicalstudies of Nazi ideology, approaching it from an anthropological perspective as a

modern revitalization movement bent on founding a new total culture casts freshlight on the extraordinary displays of theatrical, cultic politics staged by the ThirdReich. Far from simple exercises in propaganda or brainwashing, they can beseen as rituals celebrating the symbolic (and eugenic) welding of all ethnicGermans into a unified national community so as to regenerate the traditionalinstitution that Germany itself constituted within the ultra-nationalistWeltanschauung.

An anthropological approach also throws into relief the significance of theextensive process of semiotic territorialization63 by which the Nazis attempted toinfiltrate every nook and cranny of space, both external and internal space, with thesymbol of the Aryans reawakening and re-embedding in history and the soil,and its self-purging of alien influences: the Swastika.64 Likewise, the 1934 PartyCongress immortalized by Leni Riefenstahl in The Triumph of the Will isinterpretable as a lavish re-centring ceremony enacted by a latter-day shamanwhose speeches became a performative, incantatory acta spell in the originalsense of the wordin the mythic construction of a new Germany and a newhistorical era out of the ashes of the Weimar Republic.65 Such a line ofinvestigation opens up the possibility of combining insights from the Marxistconcept of the aestheticization of politics and from liberal theories of politicalreligion into a powerful heuristic device for understanding the relationshipbetween ideology and culture in the Third Reich.66

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Dining out at the end of history

It should be clear from this example that the synergetic approach to therelationship between ideology and culture being explored here (which could betermed anthropological culturalism), is to be distinguished from approachesinformed (or deformed) by the radically relativist deployment of post-modern,deconstructionist culturalism (postmodern culturalism) that has arisen in someareas of the human sciences since the linguistic turn. What recommends thisinterpretive strategy is that there is more to the reconciliation of liberal andMarxist traditions, and to attempted syntheses between the materialism andidealism of both, than some subliminal narrative drive to impose patterns

derived from arithmetic progression onto external reality. Nor is it to be dismissedas the aesthetic appeal that triadic thinking exercises on thinkers and artists givento chiliastic longings, such as Rudolf Steiner67 and Herman Hesse (or, for thatmatter, Hegel and Marx?).68 What is becoming increasingly evident from thelatest genetic research into the role of nature and nurture in forming the humanpersonality is the dynamic interdependence of each. The psychologicalpredispositions that are encoded in our genes lie dormant unless activated byenvironment and experience: genetic potentials are hatched by reality.69

The progress made by hard science in illuminating the dialectical process builtinto the emergence of the human personality and a sense of identity opens up theprospect that physical anthropology may come to cast light on the ethologicalobservations of cultural anthropology by revealing the common genetic andphysiological foundations of ideology and culture. This would provide a scientific

underpinning to Blochs speculation about the Not-Yet-Conscious and toGramscis intuition that the ability to envisage revolutionary transformations issomehow inscribed within the structure of language itself. Particularly promisingin this respect is the growing body of scientific literature written by eminentexperts from several congruent fields of expertise, notably evolutionary science,70

cognitive science,71 and the theory of consciousness,72 that point to the objectiveexistence of memes, the cognitive equivalent of genes. It is the faithful butimperfect replication of these as yet mysterious elementary particles ofconsciousness that, according to memetic theory, enables human culture notonly to be perpetuated, but to adapt to constantly changing physical habitats andhistorical conditions in the same way that genetic information is passed on throughthe genomes of DNA.

As researchers from various disciplines pursue this hypothesis, it may become

possible eventually to formulate a cogent model of ideology and culture whichsees them emerging from myriad extraordinarily subtle interactions of individualswith their inherited social and natural environment taking place in waysconditioned by the irreducibly complex interplay between genes and memes. Theemerging model points invigoratingly beyond reductionism73 towards ascientifically defensible dialectic between conditioning and voluntarism, heredityand consciousness, determinism and free-will, matter and spirit, the coercivereplication of culture and ideology and their creative adaptation. These in turn take


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us to the heart of what it is to be human as an animal that is simultaneously naturaland historical. Such a way of conceptualizing the basic issues posed by therelationship between ideology and culture at least serves as a prophylactic againstthe dangers of reductionism intrinsic to a new disciplines such asneurotheology74 and which informs purported new discoveries in thephysiological basis of the realm of spirit, such as the God gene.75

However, such a projected resolution of the issues posed by the relationshipbetween ideology and culture, the loosening and eventual untying of the Gordianknots of contested semantics and methodologies in which they are entangled atpresent, may say more about the principle of hope at work in my own ideologicalstance on academic culture than about actual developments in the real world. If the

current wrangles between academics instead continue ad infinitum, fomented ratherthan resolved by new institutions such as Oxfords Centre for Political Ideologieswhose very title leaves it open whatit proposes to do with or for them!then it issurely important for academics not to lose sight of the fact that it is a luxury to evenhave the possibility of discussing their relationship. In a world that continues to hostdeep, and if anything deepening, cultural divides, we constitute a small caste ofhuman beings able to situate ourselvesat least for theduration of a symposium or thewriting of a paper, in a hypothetical mental space outside ideology, culture, andhistory. From here we can at least imagine we are able momentarily to scrutinizedispassionately and ideology-less76 the cultural passions and ideological drives ofthe vast majority still condemned to live out the interminable eschatos of modernity.

That is unless the growing human-made ecological crises in the naturalworld willeventually prove to have marked the end of permanent liminality, whether with a

bang or a whimper, revealing modernity to have been a protracted axial age in ourown civilization after all, the interregnum between a sustainable human culture onearth and either a new one, or catastrophe.In themeantime conferences on ideologyof the sort that gave rise to this article may retain some echoes of Socrates originaldrinking feast for loquacious philosophers which bequeathed the termsymposium. However, they increasingly resemble the decadent banquet forvoyeuristic diners depicted in Douglas Adams The Restaurant at the End of theUniverse,77 the end of the universe being the only conceivable situation in whichthe demise of ideology, culture, and history itself prophesied by some 20th-centurypundits will finally come to pass as long as there are any human beings left alive.

Acknowledgement

I would like to acknowledge the help of Paul Jackson, Alfred Schobert, Bo Strath,Michael Freeden, Joe Yannielli, in making this article more coherent.

Notes and references

1. Raymond Williams, Keywords (London: Fontana, 1976), p. 87.2. Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (New York:

Randon House, 1952).3. Malcolm Hamilton, The elements of the concept of ideology, Political Studies, 35/1 (1987), p. 19.

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4. Douglas R. Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979).See particularly Chapter 20, Strange Loops, or Tangled Hierarchies.

5. Imagining is a more recently constructed construct, one that achieved considerable vogue in politicalscience research into the ideology of nationalism after the appearance in 1991 of Benedict Andersons

Imagined Communities which explored the cultural roots of nationalism as an ideology.6. In Carrolls poem it turns out that the Snark was actually a Boojum, reminiscent of the way ideology and

culture keep morphing into each other.7. Chris Barker, Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice (London: Sage, 2000), p. 5.8. Hamilton, op. cit., Ref. 3, p. 38.9. See Pierre Bourdieu (Ed. Randal Johnson), The Field of Cultural Production (Columbia: Columbia

University Press, 1994).10. Kroeber and Clyde, op. cit., Ref. 2, p. 181.11. Hamilton, op. cit., Ref. 3, p. 38.12. Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 5.

13. Geuss, ibid.14. For a plea for the application of this principle to the study of fascism see G. L. Mosse, The Fascist Revolution

(New York: Howard Fertig, 1999), p. x.15. Ronald Grigor Suny, Back and beyond: reversing the cultural turn? American Historical Review, 107/5

(December 2002), pp. 14761499.16. Suny, ibid., p. 1489.17. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 5, cited in

Suny, ibid., p. 1483.18. Suny, ibid., p. 1485.19. Suny, ibid., pp. 14945.20. At a genetic level, it is DNAs capacity for imperfectreplication that is now recognized by the life sciences as

one of the keys to the history of evolution on Earth.21. Cf. the concept of ideological morphology developed by Michael Freeden in Ideologies and Political

Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).22. James Clifford and George Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley,

CA: University of California Press, 1986), p. 19.23. William H. Sewell Jr., The Concept(s) of culture, in E. Bonnell and L. Hunt (Eds), Beyond the Cultural

Turn. New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,1999), pp. 534.

24. Patrick Brantlinger, A response to Beyond the Cultural Turn, American Historical Review, 107/5(December 2002), p. 1509.

25. Karl Jaspers first introduced this (inevitably contested) concept in The Origin and Goal of History tr. MichaelBullock (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953; first German edition 1949). It has been taken up byArnold Gehlen and outside Germany as well: see the five volumes of Johann P. Arnason, S. N. Eisenstadt andBjorn Wittrock (Eds), Axial Civilizations and World History (Leiden: Brill, 2005). On modernitysexperience of permanent liminality in contrast to premodern societies transitional phases of liminality seeArpad Szakolczai, Reflexive Historical Sociology (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 21629.

26. Lewis Mumford, The Transformation of Man (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1956).27. Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964; 1st edition, 3 vols. Munich,

Zurich: Rhein-Verlag, 19311932), p. 480.28. Broch, ibid., pp. 4458.29. Max Weber, The meaning of ethical neutrality, in E. Shils and H. Finch (Eds), Max Weber on the

Methodology of the Social Sciences (Glecoe, IL: The Free Press, 1949), pp. 20 1.30. A seminal work in this context is Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time (London: Verso: 1995).

31. G. L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses (New York: Howard Fertig, 1975).32. Emilio Gentile, Le religioni della politica (Rome, Bari: Laterza, 2001).33. Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, translated by Shaun Whiteside,

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), p. 110.34. It also should be noted that when placed in an international context, culture is much more language-specific

than ideology in its usage: e.g. in Italian civilta and cultura together cover the main connotations of Englishculture, whereas Kultur in German retains a considerable historical baggage that it does not have inEnglish, and civilisation in French often has positive cultural connotations of artistic and intellectualachievement that it lacks in English. See for example Alfed Meyers appendices A and B to Kroeber andKluckhorn, op. cit., Ref. 2, and the brief discussion of its relationship to the term civilization (pp. 113).


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35. Geuss, op. cit., Ref. 12, pp. 1222.36. Letter from Engels to Franz Mehring, London, July 14, 1893, in (Lewis Feuer Ed.) Marx and Engels. Basic

Writings on Politics and Philosophy (London: Fontana, 1969), pp. 4467.37. E.g. Raymond Williams, Base and superstructure in marxist cultural theory, in Problems in Materialism

and Culture (London: Verso, 1980).38. See particularly Lenins essays On co-operation and better fewer, but better, in Robert C. Tucker (Ed.),

The Lenin Anthology (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1975), pp. 70713.39. An important exploration of these ambiguities is provided by Walter Adamson, Hegemony and Revolution: a

Study of Antonio Gramscis Political and Cultural Theory (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,1980).

40. The classic passage in which Gramsci rejects the traditional Marxist concept of ideology as falseconsciousness is to be found in Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Quintin Hoare andGeoffrey Nowell Smith (Eds) (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), pp. 3767.

41. John Adams, Letter to Hazekiah Niles, 15 February 1818, quoted in G. Seldes, The Great Thoughts(New York: Ballantine, 1985), p. 7.

42. Louis Althusser, Ideology and ideological state apparatuses: Notes towards an investigation, Lenin andPhilosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), p. 115.

43. Louis Althusser, Essays on Ideology (London, New York: Verso, 1971), pp. 545.44. Althusser, op. cit., Ref. 42, pp. 523.45. See particularly Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx (London: Routledge, 1994), Chapter 5, Apparition

of the inapparent, the phenomenal conjuring trick, pp. 12576. At one point (p. 152) Derrida alludesto the link between commodity fetishism in Marxist thought and the anthropological concept ofanimism which endows all objects and material world with a spirit in some pre-capitalist societies, atheme well worth developing to establish the continuity between archetypal and modern aspects ofhuman culture.

46. Cf. Slavoj Zizek, The Matrix, or two sides of perversion, Philosophy Today, 43 (1999).47. Renate Holub, Gramscis theory of consciousness: between alienation, reification and Blochs principle of

hope, Antonio Gramsci, Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 1156.48. Principally in Ernst Bloch, Die Erbschaft unserer Zeit(1935), translated as Heritage of Our Times (Berkeley,

CA: University of California Press, 1990).49. Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung (1955), translated as The Principle of Hope (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

1995).

50. Cf. Douglas Kellner, Ernst Bloch, utopia and ideology critique, downloadable from his critical theorywebsite (Illuminations) at: http://www.uta.edu/english/dab/illuminations/kell1.html (25/10/04)

51. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University, 1976 (1st edition 1967).52. Jacques Derrida, Glas: que reste-t-il du savoir absolu? (Paris: Denoel, 1981), English translation John

P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand Glas, (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1986). The title Death-knell alludes not just to the end of the absolutist claims to knowledge typical of 19th century Westernthought, but of Western ethnocentrism generally with respect to culture.

53. For an example of a non-European perspective on humanexistence which throws intorelief the Eurocentrismof mostacademic literature on issues relating to culture, ideology, and creativity, see AmitGowami, The Self-

Aware Universe (London: Simon & Schuster, 1993).54. See Roger Griffin, The primacy of culture. The current growth (or manufacture) of consensus within Fascist

studies, Journal of Contemporary History, 37/1 (2002), pp. 2143.55. See Roger Griffin, Withstanding the rush of time. The prescience of G. L. Mosses anthropological approach

to fascism, in Stanley Payne (Ed.), What History Tells: George L. Mosses Study of Modern Europe(Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin, 2003).

56. See Emilio Gentile, Fascism, totalitarianism and political religion: Definitions and critical reflections on thecritiques of a theory, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 5/3 (Winter 2004).

57. E.g. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of Eternal Return (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971; 1st edition1949).

58. E.g. Clifford Geertz, The Theatre State in Bali (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).59. Again Mircea Eliades works are pivotal here. For more on the concept palingenesis see Roger Griffin,

The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1993), Chapter 2.60. E.g. William Sullivan, The Secret of the Incas Myth: Astronomy, and the War Against Time (New York:

Crown Publishers, 1996).61. E.g. D. Freidel, et al., Maya Cosmos (New York: William R. Morrow, 1993).62. Victor and Edith Turner, Religious celebrations, in Victor and Edith Turner (Eds), Celebration. Studies in

Festivity and Ritual (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982), pp. 2112.

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63. For an example of the application of this concept (first elaborated by G. Deleuze and F. Guattari) to culturalimperialism see Jose Rabasa, Inventing A-m e-r-i-c-a. Spanish Historiography and the Formation ofEurocentrism (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993).

64. See Malcolm Quinn, The Swastika (London: Routledge, 1994).65. An example of an anthropological work which has a bearing on Nazi ritual politics is Angela Hobarts

Healing Performances of Bali: Between Darkness and Light. Community Well-being and the Religious

Festival (Oxford: Berghahn, 2003).66. For an experiment in this combination see Roger Griffin, Notes towards the definition of fascist culture: the

prospects for synergy between Marxist and liberal heuristics, Renaissance and Modern Studies, 42 (Autumn2001), pp. 95 115.

67. Triadic progression is central to Steiners Theosophy. An introduction to supersensible world knowledge andthe purpose of humanity (1904).

68. For the importance of the triad as a basic Gestalt in Hesses work see Theodore Ziolkowski, The Novels ofHermann Hesse. A Study in Theme and Structure (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974).

69. See Matt Ridley, Nature via Nurture. Genes, Experience, and What Makes us Human (London: Fourth

Estate, 2003).70. See The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), Chapter 11. The prototype of the meme

concept was first proposed in Richard Semon, Die Mneme als erhaltendes Prinzip im Wechsel desorganischen Geschehens [The mneme as the principle of conservation in the flux of organic life] (3rd editionLeipzig: W. Engelmann, 1911), first published in 1904.

71. See particularly Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).72. See the section The third evolutionary process: Memes and cultural evolution, in Daniel Dennett (Ed.),

Consciousness Explained(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991).73. An allusion to a pioneering collection of essays crude refuting determinist models of the human: see Arthur

Koestler and J. R. Smythies (Eds), Beyond Reductionism (London: Hutchinson Publishing Group, 1969).Other seminal works on this theme are Arthur Koestler, Ghost in the Machine (London: HutchinsonPublishing Group, 1967); and Karl R. Popper and John C. Eccles, The Self and Its Brain (New York:Springer-Verlag, 1977).

74. R. Joseph (Ed.), NeuroTheology. Brain, Science, Spirituality and Religious Experience (Berkeley, CA:California University Press, 2002).

75. Dean Hamer, The God Gene. How Faith is Hardwired into our Genes (New York: Doubleday, 2004).76. Only phenomenologically, of course, since to step outside the force-fields of ideology and culture is

impossible, and hence a fertile heuristic fiction, like the square root of minus 1 and other imaginary numbers.77. Douglas Adam, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (London: Pan, 1980): see especially Chapter 17.


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