03 Dec Ideology, hegemony, governmentality, and theories of everything – oh my!

I finally picked up Terry Eagleton’s Ideology and started reading. I checked his book out something like 13 times before i bought my own. The first thing that struck me is that there is really no single definition of ideology. Lovely – 224 pages of no answer… i made it to page 7. But i have Winter Break to dive back in. And then i decided to give a lecture on hegemony. Turns out i couldn’t do one without the other…

Stuart Hall states, “Ideologies tend to disappear from view into the taken-for-granted “naturalized” world of common sense” (2003, 90). *whew* A way out… And that is just it – those common-sense notions, the ones that disappear so easily into how you ‘understand’ the world are precisely the ones that need to be scrutinized. So we come back to Eageleton. He tells us that ideologies can be “both illusion and the medium in which social actors make sense of the world” (2). Or at least, this is two ways in which ideologies are understood.

Is it so depressing, as he says it is?

Perhaps not so depressing as it is fortifying for understanding what ideology has to do with hegemony.

At the recent Cascadia Mini-Conference, we were asked at the plenary (and really, the lovelies Kim England, Jamie Peck, and Eugene MacCann grappled with) “Is neoliberalism the Theory of Everything?” One could ask the same of Ideology – is it the Everything that it’s made out to be? I asked the students to consider that hegemony is not a Theory of Everything.

John Morgan tells us that  “the dominant ideology in a society must be the ideology of the ruling class and ideological positions are a function of class positions” (emphasis in the original – Lecture, 14 October 2009). These common sense ways of knowing the world become the dominant ways of thinking about the world through repetition – the hegemonic ideologies, if you will… (can i say that?)… that actually silence opposing views. Raymond Williams says i can’t as he tells us:

1. Hegemony constitutes lived experience
2. Hegemony exceeds ideology
3. Lived hegemony is a process, not a system or a structure
4. Hegemony is dynamic
5. Hegemony attempts to neutralize opposition
6. Hegemony is not necessarily total

The first is that, like it or not, it always stands in virtual opposition to something else that is supposed to count as truth. Now, i believe that the problem does not consist in drawing the line between that which, in a discourse, falls under the category of scientificity or truth, and that which comes under some other category; rather, it consists in seeing historically how effects of truth are produced within discourses that, in themselves, are neither true nor false. The second drawback is that the concept of ideology referes, i think necessarily, to something o f the order of a subject. Thirdly, ideology stands in a secondary position relative to something that functions as its infrastructure, as its material, economic determinant, and so on. For these three reasons, I think that this is a notion that cannot be used without circumspection.

And this is where the notion of governmentality comes in handy. Pulling it out of the abstract and into the daily act of being – there emerges the question of governmentality. Governmentality, Wendy Brown tells us, is the set of “techniques of governing that exceed express state action and orchestrate the subject’s conduct toward him or herself [which] convenes a ‘free’ subject who rationally deliberates about alternative courses of action, makes choices, and bears responsibility for the consequences of these choices” (2005: 43).

I choose to refer to Wendy Brown because as she points out, “not only is the human being configured exhaustively as homo oeconomicus, but all dimensions of human life are cast in terms of a market rationality” (2005: 40). This extension of the market into “all dimensions” stretches beyond the scalar latitudes of body and state, as Foucault theorized them, to biomolecular and transnational, thus pushing Foucault’s notion of governmentality into a supranational frame that begins to elide, but never succeeds in erasing, national boundaries, or notions of the nation-state.

But that’s starting to get into a new post…