It is possible to identify a number of distinct and equally legitimate usages of "ideology," but those usages vary so wildly that each writer (to be intelligible) must define his/her usage of the term each time it is used. I use it, for example, to apply to spontaneous and uncritical explanations of ordinary life (something like unexamined "common sense"). That does not fit any of the senses given in the OED, at least the 2d ed., but whatever word one uses for that realm of human response, it exists and is roughly separable (at least in thought) from other realms, for example from the realms of conscious theory or of propaganda. The range of this usage is illustrated in the following from Barbara Fields. (Let me emphasize again that this does not dictate what the word _must_ mean. It points to a realm of human activity and semi-arbitrarily applies the label "idoelogy" to that realm.)
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>From "Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America," by
Barbara Jeanne Fields. New Left Review, May/June 1990.
This is perhaps a good moment to say a few words abut what ideology is and what it is not; because without an understanding of what ideology is and does, how it arises and how it is sustained, there can be no genuinely historical understanding of race. Ideology is best understood as the descriptive vocabulary of day-to-day existence through which people make rough sense of the social reality that they live and create from day to day. It is the language of consciousness that suits the particular way in which people deal with their fellows. It is the interpretation in thought of the social relations through which they constantly create and re-create their collective being, in all the varied forms their collective being may assume: family, clan, tribe, nation, class, party, business enterprise, church, army, club, and so on. As such, ideologies are not delusions but real, as real as the social relations for which they stand.
Ideologies are real, but it does not follow that they are scientifically accurate, or that they provide an analysis of social relations that would make sense to anyone who does not take ritual part in those social relations. Some societies (including colonial New England) have explained troublesome relations between people as witchcraft and possession by the devil. The explanation makes sense to those whose daily lives produce and reproduce witchcraft, nor can any amount of rational "evidence" disprove it. Witchcraft in such a society is as self-evident a natural fact as race is to Richard Cohen of the *Washington Post*. To someone looking in from outside, however, explaining a miscarriage, a crop failure, a sudden illness, or a death by invoking witchcraft would seem absurd, just as explaining slavery by invoking race must seem absurd to anyone who does not ritually produce race day in and day out as Americans do. Ideologies do not need to be plausible, let alone persuasive, to outsiders. They do their job when they help insiders make sense of the things they do and see--ritually, repetitively--on a daily basis.
So much ideology is. Here is what it is not. It is not a material entity, a thing of any sort, that you can hand down like an old garment, pass on like a germ, spread like a rumour, or impose like a code of dress or etiquette. Nor is it a collection of dissociated beliefs--"attitudes" is the favoured jargon among American social scientists and historians they have mesmerized--that you can extract from their context and measure by current or retrospective survey research. (Someday the reification of conduct and demeanour in "attitudes" will seem as quaint and archaic as their reification in bodily "humours"--phlegmatic, choleric, melancholic, sanguine--does now.) Nor is it a Frankenstein's monster that takes on a life of its own.
Ideology is not the same as *propaganda*. Someone who said, "Anti-slavery *ideology* infiltrated the slave quarters through illicit abolitionist newspapers," would be talking rather about propaganda than about ideology. The slaves' anti-slavery ideology could not be smuggled to them in alien newsprint. People deduce and verify their ideology in daily life. The slaves' anti-slavery ideology had to arise from their lives in slavery and from their daily relations with slaveholders and other members of slave society.[35] Frederick Douglass was not propounding a paradox but speaking the simple truth when he said that the first anti-slavery lecture he ever heard was delivered by his master in the course of explaining to his mistress why slaves must not be taught to read. By the same token, slaves who decided at the first shot of the Civil War--or even earlier, with Lincoln's election--that emancipation was finally on the nation's agenda were not responding to prevailing Northern propaganda (which, indeed, promised nothing of the kind at that time). It was their experience with slaveowners, not least the slaveowners' hysterical equation of the Republican Party with abolition, that made slaves see Lincoln as the emancipator before he saw himself that way. And, I might add, it was the slaves' acting on that foreknowledge that forced Lincoln to become the emancipator.
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{35. The slaves' religion arose in the same way. In an astute and eloquent passage, Donald G. Mathews diagnoses the error of supposing that the slaves should or could have had a "correct" version of Christianity by an outside agency. To argue that way, Mathews correctly insists, presupposes that the slave could "slough off his enslavement, ancestry, traditional ways of viewing the world, and sense of selfhood in order to think the oppressor's thoughts after him. . . .The description of action in which the slave is expected to remain passive while receiving a discrete body of ideas and attitudes which exist apart from social and cultural conditions reveals one of the most mischievous and flawed assumptions which scholars make." *Religion in the Old South*, Chicago, 1967, p. 187.}
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*Ideology, Propaganda and Dogma*
To insist that ideology and propaganda are not the same is not to suppose that they are unrelated. The most successful propagandist is one who thoroughly understands the ideology of those to be propagandized. When propagandists for secession before the American Civil War emphasized the danger that the Northerners might encroach upon Southerners' right of self-determination, they emphasized a theme that resonated as well with the world of non-slaveholders as with that of planters, even though the two worlds differed as night from day. "We will never be slaves" was good secessionist propaganda. "We must never let them take our slaves" would have been poor propaganda and the secessionists knew it; just as today "Strategic Defense Initiative" makes a good advertisement for a weapons programme, whereas "Strategic Offensive Initiative" or "First- Strike Initiative" would not.
Neither is ideology the same as *doctrine* or *dogma*. Pro-slavery *doctrine* might well hold, for example, that any white person's word must take precedence over any black person's. But the push-and-shove reality of any planter's business would tell him or her that some situations call for accepting a slave's word over an overseer's. [36] After all, overseers came and went, but slaves remained; and the object was to produce cotton or sugar or rice or tobacco, not to produce white supremacy. The perfect subordination of the slaves to the overseer, if coupled with poor production, would spell disaster for the planter. Thus, the ideology of a planter--that is, the vocabulary of day-to-day action and experience--must make room for contest and struggle (perhaps couched in paternalistic or racist language), even if doctrine specified an eternal hierarchy. Doctrine or dogma may be imposed, and they often are: dissenters can be excommunicated from a church or expelled from a party. But ideology is a distillate of experience. Where the experience is lacking, so is the ideology that only the missing experience could call into being. Planters in the Old South could have imposed their understanding of the world upon the non-slaveholders or the slaves only if they could have transformed the lives of the non-slaveholders and slaves into a replica of their own.
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{36. Genovese, *Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made*, New York 1974, p. 16.}
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An ideology must be constantly created and verified in social life; if it is not, it dies, even though it may seem to be safely embodied in a form that can be handed down. [37] Many Christians still think of kneeling with folded hands as the appropriate posture for prayer, but few now know why; and the few who do know cannot, even if they choose, mean the same thing by it as was meant by those to whom the posture was part of an ideology still real in everyday social life. The social relations that once gave explicit reality to that ritual gesture of the vassal's subordination to his lord are now as dead as a mackerel, and so, therefore, is the ideological vocabulary--including the posture of prayer--in which those social relations once lived.
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{37. Some people imagine that ideology can indeed be handed down in the form of law. If that were so, then the law could do without courts, lawyers, judges and juries.}
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[clip] *Shaping the Terrain*
Let me pursue a bit further this analogy of terrain. But imagine a physical landscape: trees here, a river there, mountains, valleys, quicksand, desert and so on. And imagine an observer at the altitude of an earth satellite, who for some reason can follow the paths of people over the terrain but cannot see the details of the landscape. The observer sees people tunneling under, climbing over, jogging to left or right, moving with odd swimming motions, even disappearing unceremoniously into the quicksand Given a modicum of training in the orthodox tradition of American history, he might conclude that people in this part of the landscape have "attitudes" calling for one kind of movement, while people in that part have "attitudes" calling for another kind--all of these "attitudes" possessing a "life of their own." Given a modicum of wisdom, he would realize that the key to understanding the people's movements is to analyse the terrain.
Therein, also, lies the key to understanding how one group acquires authority, imposes order, or achieves hegemony. Exercising rule means being able to shape the terrain. Suppose that the ruling group wants everyone in our landscape to move east, and therefore starts fires in the forests to the west. Mission accomplished: everybody moves east. Because they all share a conviction -- an "attitude" -- glorifying the virtues of easterly movement? Not necessarily. All that order, authority, hegemony requires is that the interest of the mass in not getting burned alive should intersect the interest of the rulers in moving everyone to the east. If easterly movement subsequently becomes part of the routine by which masses organize their lives independently of the rulers so that such movement becomes part of a constantly repeated social routine, a vocabulary will soon enough explain to the masses --not analytically, but descriptively -- what easterly movement means. And that vocabulary need not and cannot be a duplicate of the one spoken by the rulers. *******
Enough for now.
Carrol