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5 Ideology and the Metaphysics of Content B y and large, the key question in the modern study of ideology is “What are the implications of what people read, hear, see, and speak for what they think and do?” The “what” that is read, heard, seen, and spoken may exist on the surface of communication—as speech or message—or in the textured and driven depths of something one now calls “discourse”; but the issue remains in either case the relation of an extra-subjective content to the control and management of receptive, vulnerable subjects. The problem with this orientation is that it feeds upon an empiricism that constantly threatens to idealize content, control, vulnerability, and its own position. One is in danger, at all points, of having to choose between the reality of content and the reality of subject, at best treating the one not chosen as an external modifier of or influence upon the other. Yet as long as the study of ideology presumes an external relationship between control and the controlled, and correspondingly presumes that the former operates by delivering definite and exclusive contents to definite and distinct subjects, it must invoke theories exceptional to historical materialism to account for what must appear as effects : Subjects contain ideas, at once complete and vulnerable, that dispose them to action; individual consciousness is modified by information that it receives and processes, on its own account, as cognitive structure; thought occurs through the integration of sociologically typical coded materials—presentations—with the psychologically typical codal formations of the mind; the psychodynamics of total personality is the stable base for a mental superstructure of orientations, either of action or attitude; experience is the group speaking through the person. None of these hypotheses can be defended by historical materialism. Yet all and more are presupposed in one way or another by contemporary studies of ideology and “communication.” To that extent, they lend weight to a certain social psychological exceptionalism that has developed in the theoretical discussion of culture and consciousness, and a consequent loosening of ties between that discussion and the main body of Marxian theory and critical practice.1 That this metaphysics of content has secured itself within a theoretical tradition firmly opposed to any metaphysics is curious enough. This paradox is not fatal in and of itself; it tells the truth of its own historical experience, the confrontation of Marxism with the established academic disciplines. What is critically significant is the consolidation of this metaphysics and its elevation as meta-theory beyond the imperatives of its original historical circumstance, the concrete situation that takes it concretely into account. There, it served as pretheory, as an instance of practical reason within a particular politically charged setting. Here, it threatens to become an ideological disposition, a conceptual base for the further development of Marxism and for the proliferation of the “regional” Marxisms with which we are now so familiar—cultural, ideological, political, linguistic, etc. In its “original” academic circumstance after the 1960s, Marxism was obliged to demonstrate that its scholarship was appropriate to academic discourse. This involved bringing Marxism itself into convenient connection with objectivities already identified within and defined by that discourse— society, the individual, conflict, status, values, institutions, organization. It also involved establishing a tradition of scholarship validated by the engagement of classics already firmly rooted in the general institutional histories of disciplines and departments. The metaphysics of content was, as we shall see, a necessary condition of that demonstration. Marxism came to be, variously, a paradigm, a point of view, or a theory of a reality equally and equitably claimed by other such formations, with which it could therefore invoke the rights of cohabitation and dialogue; so it was that Marxism could be received by the family of disciplines as their prodigal niece, now chastened and humble, offering the small insights of her travels and the modest hypotheses of her insights. Its truth, in that circumstance , depended on the conditions of its acceptance. These were the curricular limits of what it could present as a point of view, a theory, even a paradigm. On the other hand, its capacity to remain the Marxism of historical materialism and to continue its engagement with socialism required an appropriation of objects—authentic and traditional works—beyond dispute on the Left as well as unarguably possessed of scholarly respectability within the academy. The success of this doubled membership, this coverage on all fronts, lay...

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