[...]
We have seen that the importance of ideology can be quesioned on several grounds. It can be claimed t hat there is no coherent dominant ideology, or that if there is then it is much less effective in shaping popular experience than has sometimes been thoght. You can argue that advanced capitalism is a self-sustaining “game” which keeps us in place much less [41] through ideas than by its material techniques; and that among these techniques the coercion of the economic is far more effective than any sort of sermonizing. The system, so it is suggested, maintains itself less through the imposition of ideological meaning than through destroying meaning altogether, and what meanings the masses do entertain can be at odds with those of their rulers without any serious disruption ensuing. Finally, it may be that there is a dominant ideology at work, but nobody is gullible enough to fall for it. All of these cases have their kernel of truth - not least the claim that material factors play a more vital role in securing submission than ideological ones. It is also surely true that popular consciousness is far from being some obedient “instantiation” of ruling ideological values, but runs counter to them in significant ways. If this gap looms sufficiently wide, then a crisis of legitimacy is likely to ensue; it is unrealistic to imagine that as long as people do what is required of them, what they think about what they are doing is neither here nor there.

Taken as a whole, however, this end-of-ideology thesis is vastly implausible. If it were true, it would be hard to know why so many individuals in these societies still flock to church, wrangle over politics in the pubs, care about what their children are being taught in school and lose sleep over the steady erosion of the social services. The dystopian view that the typical citizen of advanced capitalism is the doped telly viewer is a myth, as the ruling class itself is uncomfortably aware. The doped telly viewer will soon enough join a picket line if her wage-packet is threatened, or become politically active if the government contemplates driving a motorway through his back garden. The “left” cynicism of a Baudrillard is insultingly complicit with what the system would like to believe - that everything now “works all by itself”, without regard to the way social issues are shaped and defined in popular experience. If that experience really was entirely two-dimensional, then the consequences for the system would be grim. For the result, as we have seen, would be an accelerated outbreak of “pathological” symptoms in society as a whole, as a citizenry deprived of meaning sought to create it in violent, gratuitous ways. Any ruling order must throw its underlings enough meaning to be going on with; and if the logic of consumerism, bureaucracy, “instant” culture and “managed” politics is to sap the very resources of social significance, then this is in the long run exceedingly bad news for the governing order. Advanced capitalist society still requires the dutiful, self-disciplined, intelligently conformist subjects which some see as typical only of capitalism’s “classical” phase; it is just that these particular [43] modes of subjectivity are locked in conflict with the quite different forms of subjecthood appropriate to “postmodernist” order, and this is a contradiction which the system itself is quite powerless to resolve. (pp.41-43.)

[...]

For Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno, capitalist society languishes in the grip of an all-pervasive reification, all the way from commodity fetishism and speech habits to political bureaucracy and technological thought. This seamless monolith of a dominant ideology is apparently devoid of contradictions - which means, [46] in effect, that Marcuse and Adorno take it at face value, judging it as it would wish to appear. If reification exerts its sway everywhere, then this must presumably include the criteria by which we judge reification in the first place - in which case we would not be able to identify it at all, and the late Frankfurt School critique becomes an impossibility. The final alienation would be not to know that we were alienated. To characterize a situation as reified or alienated is implicitly to point to practices and possibilities which surest an alternative to it, and which can thus become criterial of our alienated condition. For Jürgen Habermas, as we shall see later, these possibilities are inscribed in the very structures of social communication; while for Raymond Williams they spring from the complexity and contradictoriness of all social experience. “No mode of production”, Williams argues, “and therefore no dominant social order and therefore no dominant culture ever in reality includes or exhausts all human practice, human energy, and human intention.” [Marxism and Literature, Oxford 1977, p.132.] Every social formation is a complex amalgam of what Williams terms “dominant”, “residual” and “emergent” forms of consciousness, and no hegemony can thus ever be absolute. No sharper contrast could be found than with the later work of Michel Foucault, for whom regimes of power constitute us to our very roots, producing just those forms of subjectivity on which they can most efficiently go to work. But if this is so, what is there “left over”, so to speak, to find this situation so appalling? What, including one Michel Foucault, could conceivably protest against this condition, given that all subjectivity is merely the effect of power in the first place? If there is nothing beyond power, then there is nothing that is being blocked, categorized and regimented, and therefore absolutely no need to worry. Foucault does indeed speak his resistances to power; but what exactly is doing the resisting is an enigma his work does not manage to dispel.’ (pp.46-47.)

[Further quotes Williams, citing Soviet philosopher V. N. Voloshinov distinction between behavioural ideology and established systems of ideas:] There is some relation between this conception and Raymond Williams’s celebrated notion of a “structure of feeling” - those elusive, impalpable forms of social consciousness which are at once as evanescent as “feeling” suggests, but nevertheless display a significant configuration captured in the term “structure”. “We are talking”, Williams writes, “about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone: specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationship: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity.” [Marxism and Literature, p.125.]

What such a notion seeks to deconstruct is the familiar opposition between ideology as rigid, explicit doctrine on the one hand, and the supposedly inchoate nature of lived experience on the other. This opposition is itself ideologically eloquent: from what kind of social standpoint does lived experience appear utterly shapeless and chaotic? Virginia Woolf may [48] well have regarded her life in this way, but her servants are less likely to have regarded their days as deliciously fluid and determinate. (pp.48-49.)

[Cf., earlier remark: The fact that I employ a team of six hard-pressed servatns around the clock does not prevent me from believing in some suitably nebulous way that all men and women are equal. In an ideal world I would employ no servants at all, but htere are pressing pragmatic reasons just at the moment why I am unable to live up to my burningly held beliefs. ... (p.41.) ]

[...]

In the transition from Hegel to Arthur Schopenhauer, we can observe this dramatic shift of perspective taking place. Hegel’s philosophy represents a last-ditch, eleventh-hour attempt to redeem the world for Reason, setting its face sternly against all mere intuitionism; but what in Hegel is the principle or Idea of Reason, unfurling its stately progress through history, has become Will in Schopenhauer the blind, voracious - the empty, insatiable hankering which lies at the core of all phenomena. The intellect for Schopenhauer is just a crude, blundering servant of this implacable force, twisted out of true by it, an inherently misrepresenting faculty which believes itself pathetically to present things as they really are. What for Marx and Engels is a specific social condition, in which ideas obscure the true nature of things, is in Schopenhauer generalized to the structure of the mind as such. And from a Marxist standpoint, nothing could be more ideological than this view that all thought is ideological. It is as though Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Representation (1819) does just what he describes the intellect as doing; offering as an objective truth about reality what is in fact the partisan perspective of a society governed increasingly by interest and appetite. The greed, malice and aggressiveness of the bourgeois market place are now simply the way it is with humanity, mystified to a metaphysical Will.

Schopenhauer stands at the fountainhead of a long tradition of irrationalist [161] thought for which concepts are always ineffectual and approximate, incapable of capturing the ineffable quality of lived experience. The intellect carves up the complexity of that experience into arbitrary chunks, freezing its fluidity into static categories. Such speculations are rife in Romanticism, pass into the “vitalist” thought of Henri Bergson and D. H. Lawrence, and can even be glimpsed in the post-structuralist opposition between “metaphysical closure” and the unthinkable play of difference. All thought is thus a form of alienation, distancing reality in the very act of trying to seize it Concepts are just pale reflections of the real; but to see concepts as “reflections” at all is surely very strange. To have a concept is simply to be able to use a word in a particular way; it is not to be regretted that the word “coffee” lacks the grainy texture and rich aroma of the actual thing. There is no “nameless gap” here between the mind and the world. Having a concept is no more like having an experience than throwing a tantrum is like throwing a party. It is only because we are tempted to think of concepts in empiricist style as “images” or “offprints” of the world that we begin to fret about the eternal rift between the two.

The Will for Schopenhauer is quite futile and purposeless, but shields us from a knowledge of its own utter pointlessness by breeding in us a delusion known as the intellect. The intellect obtusely believes life to be meaningful, which is just a cunning ruse on the Will’s part to keep on perpetuating itself. It is as though the Will takes pity on our hunger for significance and throws us just enough to be going on with. Like capitalism for Marx, or like the unconscious for Freud, the Schopenhauerian Will includes its own dissemblance within itself, known to a gullible humanity as reason. Such reason is just a superficial rationalizing of our desires, but believes itself to be sublimely disinterested. For Immanuel Kant, the world revealed to us by “pure” (or theoretical) reason is just an assemblage of mechanistic causal processes, as opposed to the realm of `practical’ reason, or morality, where we know ourselves to be free, purposive agents. But it is difficult for us to subsist comfortably in this duality, so Kant looks to aesthetic experience as a way of bridging it In the act of aesthetic judgement, a piece of the external world momentarily appears to have some kind of purposive point to it, thus assuaging our rage for meaning.

The antithesis in Schopenhauer between intellect and will is a version of the later vexed opposition between theory and ideology. If theory informs us that reality lacks all immanent significance, then we can only act purposefully by suppressing this gloomy knowledge, which is one meaning of [162] “ideology”. All action, as we have seen with Nietzsche and Althusser, is thus a sort of fiction. If for Althusser we cannot act and theorize simultaneously, for Schopenhauer we have a problem even in walking and talking at the same time. Meaning depends on a certain oblivion of our true condition, and has its roots sunk deeply in non-meaning. To act is to lose the truth at the very point of trying to realize it. Theory and practice, intellect and will, can never harmoniously coincide; and Schopenhauer must therefore presumably hope that nobody who reads his philosophy will be in the least affected by it, since this would be exactly the kind of instance of theory transforming our interests which he is out to deny.

There is another paradox about Schopenhauer’s writing, which it is worth touching upon briefly. Is that writing the product of the intellect or the will, of “theory” or “ideology”? If it is a product of the Will, then it is just one more expression of that Will’s eternal pointlessness, with no more truth or meaning than a rumbling of the gut But it cannot be a work of the intellect either, for the intellect is hopelessly estranged from the true nature of things. The question, in other words, is whether the claim that reason is inherently falsifying is not a species of performative contradiction, denying itself in the very act of assertion. And this is one of the many vexed issues which Schopenhauer will bequeath to his more celebrated successor, Friedrich Nietzsche.

The reality of things for Nietzsche is not Will but power; but this leaves reason in much the same situation as it was with Schopenhauer. Reason for Nietzsche is just the way we provisionally carve up the world so that our powers may best flourish, it is a tool or servant of those powers, a kind of specialized function of our biological drives. As such, it can no more submit those drives to critical scrutiny than can the Schopenhauerian intellect take the measure of the Will which propels it. Theory cannot reflect critically on the interests of which it is the expression? “A critique of the faculty of knowledge”, Nietzsche proclaims, “is senseless: how should a tool be able to criticise itself when it can only use itself for the critique?” [The Will to Power, NY 1968, p.269.] The fact that Nietzsche’s own philosophy would appear to do just that is one of the several paradoxes he presents us with. [...] (pp.161-63.)