Eagleton on Ideology: Six Types of Ambiguity

Review Eagleton on Ideology: Six Types of Ambiguity GREIG HENDERSON Terry Eagleton. Ideology: An Introduction Verso 1991. 242 . $74.95; $22.50 paper 'Ideology' is such a charged and vexed term that many people, taking in hand a volume about this topic/-might well be tempted to follow Hume's famous advice. 'Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning fact or number? Does it contain experimental reasoning concerning matter offact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain but sophistry and illusion.' Nevertheless, pronouncements about the end of ideology are surely premature, and however enticing the 'prospects of committing it to the flames might be, this richly ambiguous term can still do useful conceptual work, as Eagleton's thought-provoking book amply and cogently demonstrates. Moreover, in this post-Nietzschean world, experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence is itself Hkely to be labelled sophistry and illusion, matters of fact being, as everyone knows, matters of interpretation. Indeed, the place where a system of interested interpretations masquerades as a system of disinterested facts, where nature and universal essence are invoked and history and social existence obscured, where ideas are detached from the material conditions that enable them - this is the place where ideology lives, and this place no doubt is any society. But if ideology is such an all-pervasive phenomenon, and if would-be demystifiers are positioned within the social totality, how can they ever become fully conscious of their own ideological conditioning, how can they find some uncontaminated free space that escapes ideology's operations, how can they transcend the situatedness of their own discourse? Clearly, they cannot. And this is the uncomfortable consequence of embracing postrnodern dogmas concerning, among other things, antifoundationalism (the belief that there are no empirical facts or rationalist ideas upon which knowledge is grounded), coherentism (the belief that propositions about the world can only achieve the truth of internal coherence and do not correspond to any external frame of reference), and relativism (the belief that everything is relative to the vocabulary and perspective of the observer whose own situatedness makes objectivity impossible). Although in practice we are remarkably adept at distinguishing our reasonsfrom their rationalizations, and ourideas from their ideologyf we know that UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 61, NUMBER 2, WINTER 1991/2 . IDEOLOGY 281 such manoeuvrings are instances of self-deception and double-dealing. Here is the double bind that words ineluctably get us into; there are metalanguages, but no metalanguage. Yet ifwe truly believed what wemechanicallyutter, then how could we presume to write about, say, ideology? What status could ideological statements about ideology possibly enjoy? How could they avoid their own self-dismantling and self-devouring logic? Do the Nietzschean interpretations that demystify positivist and empiricist science and philosophy have any factual basis or metalinguistic authority? These are familiar questions, and we already know the turning and turning of the widening gyre, we already know that the logocentre cannot hold, that meaningis indeterminate, that the free play ofsigniHers is endless, that rhetoric subverts reference, that mere anarchy is loosed upon the wor(l)d. That these ideas spew forth so effortlessly - along with others about hegemony, discourse, legitimation, power, race, gender, sexual orientation, etc - indicates their ideological status. They are what Barthes calls the goes-without-saying, and for all ofthe routine self-reflexiveness thatattends theirarticulation, they arealmost a kind of theoretical unconscious. But that does not mean, as Eagleton points out, that this theoretical unconscious is necessarily false. Ideology, in the Althusserian sense of the term, embraces the ways we live our relations to society as a whole. It is thus a habitual style of perception that has affective and unconscious components as well as cognitive and conscious ones. It is one thing to expose the contradictions between what a text says and what a text does, and quite another to recognize our own inurement to contradictions between what we say and what we do. The contradictions we expose in no way eradicate the contradictions we live. Eagleton's project hinges on a stipulated distinction between criticism and critique. The former presupposes some transcendental vantage-point; the latter recognizes the situatedness of one...