***** The road outside Highgate cemetery. A nice day. CYRIL and SHIRLEY arrive on their motorbike. They get off, cross the road and go in. CYRIL takes off his crash helmet.
They walk through the cemetery. Both now have their helmets off. SHIRLEY stops to look at a tree. CYRIL exhorts her to 'come on.' She does so.
They stop at Karl Marx's grave. They gaze up at the big, bearded head.
SHIRLEY: 'E's a bit big, in' 'e? CYRIL: 'E was a giant. SHIRLEY: No, I mean 'is 'ead. CYRIL: 'E's all right. What 'e done was, 'e wrote down the truth: people was bein' exploited. Industrial Revolution, they was forced off the land into the factories. There weren't no working class before then. He set down a programme for change. [SHIRLEY is reading (and we see) the inscribed names of Marx's family.] He's got his 'ole family in there with him. Without Marx there wouldn't've been nothing. SHIRLEY: Oh, look. His grandson was only four when he died. CYRIL: Well, kids died young in them days. SHIRLEY: I know. CYRIL: There'd be no unions, no welfare state, no nationalized industries... [SHIRLEY is looking at the bunch of red roses at the foot of the grave.] SHIRLEY: I wish I'd bought some flowers now. CYRIL: Don't matter, does it? Flowers! SHIRLEY: What d'you mean, it don't matter? CYRIL: 'E's dead! SHIRLEY: You're going on about 'im. CYRIL: I'm talking about his ideas. SHIRLEY: I know. [Pause. She reads.] 'The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, 'owever, is to change it.' There y'are. [She walks away towards some new graves.] Oh, look, there's the Chairman of the South African Communist Party 'ere. [She stops by the chairman's grave.] Oh, sempervivums! I got these in the back room at 'ome. They are succulents. [But CYRIL is sharing his thoughts with Karl Marx...]
A few minutes later. SHIRLEY strolls back and looks at a grave behind CYRIL. CYRIL: Thing is, change what? It's a different world now, innit? SHIRLEY: That ivy could do with a bit of a prune. [She rejoins him.] CYRIL: By the year 2000, there'll be thirty-six TV stations, twenty-four hours a day, telling you what to think... [A group of nine tourists from the People's Republic of China now appear and group themselves round CYRIL and SHIRLEY, discussing the memorial quietly and enthusiastically in Mandarin. Meanwhile...] SHIRLEY: They've planted them tress right on top of them graves up there. CYRIL: Like pissing in the wind, innit? [SHIRLEY looks at CYRIL for a moment but says nothing. He glances at her.] *****
Ernest Laclau, "The Impossibility of Society": "The ideological would be the will to 'totality' of any totalizing discourse. And insofar as the social is impossible without some fixation of meaning, without the discourse of closure, the ideological must be seen as constitutive of the social."
Ellen Wood describes the dialectical pair of responses generated by this theme and its material base thus: "The typical mode of these alternative visions is voluntaristic utopia or counsel of despair -- or, as is often the case, both at once: a vision of a transformed society without real hope for a process of transformation" (_The Retreat from Class_).
As class becomes reduced to just another 'identity,' and capitalism fades into the noumenal beyond and comes back laundered as 'classism,' the concept of ideology gets either dropped (and becomes discourse in the fashion of sociology of knowledge) or reformulated, for instance, like this: "the concept of ideology should be reformulated in relation to a theory of _power_ and _domination_ -- to the modes in which systems of signification enter into the existence of sectional forms of domination" (Anthony Giddens, "Four Theses on Ideology"). Power and domination are concepts that can't grasp what makes capitalism what it is (in contrast to earlier modes of production); analyses of power and domination are for post-Marxists, however, useful substitutes for class analyses, in that they multiply points of application of micropolitics.
Also, the concept of ideology is sometimes made to encompass everything -- hence it becomes redundant and useless: "Ideology can no longer be understood as an infra-superstructural relation between a material production (system and relations of production) and a production of signs (culture, etc.) which expresses and marks the contradictions at the 'base'. Henceforth, all of this comprises, with the same degree of objectivity, a general political economy (its critique), which is traversed throughout by the same form and administered by the same logic" (Baudrillard, _For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign_). In one sense, this 'inflation of discourse,' to use Terry Eagleton's words, merely replicates the structure of commonsense perception in the Society of Spectacles. Therefore, it doesn't have any critical edge that is often attributed to it. Though those like Angela might insist that this definition of ideology mirrors the moment of 'real subsumption,' we can't understand & explain _why_ we see the way we do by looking into, and getting lost in, a modernist hall of mirrors, a funhouse of apocalyptic theory (those who want it can do better by watching Orson Welles' _Citizen Kane_ [1941] or _The Lady from Shanghai_ [1948] than reading Baudrillard). In other words, commodity fetishism can't explain commodity fetishism or what generates it.
retrofitting rosebud,
Yoshie