Jerry Monaco wrote:
>
>
> My point here is that all this throwing brains about over "ideology"
> does not improve on the common sense view expressed by Chomsky and for
> that matter Marx and Engels in the German Ideology.
My view of the term "ideology" has always been to let writers adopt a Humpty-Dumpty view of it: it means what they want it to mean. _One_ useful sense it can bear, I think, is as "common sense," the more-or-less spontaneous explanation of the world as it comes to people in daily practice. A certain group of people live under miserable conditions. Common sense: they bring it on themselves. A certain group of people do most of the tasks of keeping us going from day to day. Common sense: They _like_ to do that and they are "unwomanly" if they don't like it.
And within _capitalism_ the generating force in such common sense interpretations of the world is the unanalyzed concept generated by commodity production of the "abstract -- isolated -- individual," existing prior to and autonomously of social relations, social relations themselves being merely the sum total of the actions of such individuals.
I don't know if this is what either Angelus or Zizek has in mind. But it is a major element in thinking in advanced capitalist nations at least, and is something most western literature since Milton has wrestled with.
> "Plato's problem, then is to explain how we know so much, given that
> evidence to us is so sparse. Orwell's problem is to explain why we
> know and understand so little, even though evidence available to us is
> so rich. Like many other twentieth-century intellectuals, Orwell was
> impress with the ability of totalitarian systems to instill beliefs
> that are firmly held and widely accepted although they are completely
> without foundation and often plainly at variance with obvious facts
> about the world around us.
This is propaganda, not ideology. Ideology (as I use it) is what makes such propaganda possible.
Carrol