A little while back I finished Goran Therborn’s short book The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology. I’ve got notes on it in a few places on my computer. I thought I’d write up some thoughts here about what I recall from and like about the book. The main part of the book that I found illuminating is Therborn’s taxonomizing of kinds of ideological actions. Implied in that as well is that ideology is an activity rather than a set of contents. The activity of ideology for Therborn is one of encouraging people to be a certain kind of subject - say, a parent, a spouse, a citizen, an educator, or a husband, a father, a patriot, a college professor. These categories are non-exhaustive and they exist at least as much as actions as states of being: that is, people are called upon to enact one or more of these subjectivities in specific contexts. (This resonates with what I (mis?)remember from Foucault.) Therborn refers to that act of calling upon as interpellating. Interpellation is in effect the name for ideology as an activity.
Therborn lays out some building blocks that, if I recall correctly, he calls fundamental modes of interpellation. They are what does or does not exist, what is and is not good, and is or is not possible. From there he lays out a six place taxonomy, which represent basic orientations toward a social order: accommodation, representation, fear, inevitability, deference, and resignation. I’m not entirely clear on all of the differences between, say, inevitability and resignation, and I’m agnostic as to whether or not this exhaustive - maybe these should really be just five items or maybe there should be two more or whatever; I don’t much care. I find these helpful as a jumping off point for kinds of orientations to society in the present.
I find it interesting as well to consider affective states like fear as ideological. There is a, for lack of a better term, propositional content to fear, but it’s also deeply felt. Both aspects matter, I think. This is different from thinking of ideology as just a set of ideas, as just propositional content. It suggests that structures of feeling and ideologies are at least some of the time the same sort of social processes, and play similar roles in reproducing capitalist society.
Therborn is dismissive of Althusser’s category of ideological state apparatus, without a lot of detail to back up the dismissal. I wasn’t troubled by that as its not a category that matters much to me, but a devout Althusserian would likely be unconvinced. In any case, I think part of the value of Therborn’s framework is in helping make more concrete a point Althusser makes somewhere about ideological state apparatuses and repressive state apparatuses. As I recall it, Althusser wrote that the distinction was a conceptual or taxonomic one, not really a distinction in the world, because all (state?) apparatuses have both repressive and ideological elements, or act both repressively and ideologically. Therborn’s framework doesn’t say much about repression and instead I think usefully expands the category of ideology so that police putting down a riot can be seen to act ideologically, just not in the same way that media broadcasts act ideologically. That is, the act of putting down the riot in effect subjectifies people, interpellates them into basic subjective orientations like fear, deference, resignation, and so on. To put it another way, the violence of repression in its actual existence is often symbolic - not just symbolic, to be sure, but it has a symbolic meaning, it has subjective effects on the people subjected to that violence in various ways (the people who are directly laid hands upon by the state’s technicians of brutality, their surviving loved ones and others in the society affected by these acts). It may be possible in very particular and I suspect exceptional circumstances for there to be acts of violence absent of symbolic elements, but I doubt it. It also may be that in very particular circumstances the symbolic element of violence is analytically unimportant. In situations where state repressive forces have been deployed people would understandably need to focus on immediate issues such as evading them or reducing the harm they could inflict -- when police are swinging batons and firing teargas the immediate problem is likely not a symbolic one for the people under attack. That said, even then, should a line of protesters run, retreat and regroup, or press forward, or should someone being interrogated name their comrades or refuse to do so, that has a symbolic or cultural or meaning-laden - an ideological - dimension. I suppose that is at least as much as a matter of, so to speak, counter-ideologies and counter-interpellations, counter at least to those that would provoke running away. (This is not to say it’s worse to run per se, merely to say that even in instances of direct state repression there are to some extent still ideological elements present.) All of this is to say that if we think of ideology and interpellation as pressuring people to adopt subjective orientations or subject positions, we can move a great deal of repressive activity into the category, even if the instruments of interpellation have very important corporeal aspects and not just propositional contents. (I guess I would say as well that the body and the person is at least in part propositional.)
Two other bits of the book I want to note then I’m going to stop. One is the emphasis on an ongoing relationship between what Therborn calls subjection and qualification. I am frankly not entirely clear on this, but my sense is that subjection means getting someone into a kind of subject position while qualification means making them recognizable as that position and able to actually do what the position requires. If one is, say, compelled to enact patriotism that is subjection. If one is in fact relatively fluent in the speaking and doing of patriotism, that’s qualification. Imagine someone who feels deeply patriotic but does not know to stand hand on heart during the national anthem, or does not recognize what the anthem is. That person will not be recognized by others as a fully functioning patriot. This can go for professional positions - a teacher who doesn’t know how to teach, or someone who is in fact a skilled educator but is not permitted to teach.
Social institutions both subject and qualify people. Once subjected and qualified people must still navigate the world and other parts of the world may be out of step with those subjection-and-qualification processes. I don’t recall if Therborn has a term for the relationship between the subjected-and-qualified and their social context. I’ll call it ‘reception’, meaning the uptake of those people. It may be that I am using qualification differently than Therborn does. It’s clear to me that Therborn has a sense that what was once a working qualification can eventually stop working, resulting in hardship for the people on whom that is inflicted and, potentially, some social problems.
This kind of being out of step, what I would call a reception problem, seems to me to exist now in the US regarding educational institutions and labor markets, in various ways for different aspects of those institutions and markets. I think this is part of what is going on with news reports about young people being more left wing these days, I think there is a widespread sense among some populations of having been sold a bill of goods under false pretenses, something like ‘we did what we were told and you backed out of your side of the bargain.’ (By the way, to my mind this can look like systemic generation of anti-systemic resistance, but to my mind this is more like the generation of multiple pro-systemic subject positions that are in contention over specific forms of institutionalizing this social system. To be much less abstract: the renewed socialism in the present and its forerunners in, say, Occupy and before that the anti-globalization movement, is largely a matter of a conflict between different versions of capitalism rather than being a matter of an actually different social order. So to my mind tensions around subjection, qualification, what I called a reception problem, are not so much sources of anti-systemic politics as they are a perhaps friction-laden social laboratory for producing innovations in system-maintenance.)
The last bit I want to highlight in the book is what Therborn discusses in terms of ego and alter, which if I recall correctly is at least originally a set of psychoanalytic terms. Ego ideology is about self-identification - I, we. It’s a matter of how people and groups define who they are and who their fellows and members are. For instance: ’We the men in the room...’ ‘Dear fellow white people...’ ‘All of us who are education professionals...’ ‘Comrades...’ Alter ideologies are about other-identification. This can take more or less amiable or hostile forms. For instance: ’You people always...’ ‘They keep coming over here and taking our...’ ‘Children need structure, which is why as parents we have to...’ ‘We must listen to the voices of...’ ‘Our patients needs us to stand up for them...’ In these examples, I think, it’s clearer how self- and other-ideologies are intertwined. Another way to think of it, it seems to me, is that ideologies often identify in and out groups and define relationships between them with, like I said, varying degrees of hostility and amiability, and varying degrees of passivity vs autonomy. Still I do think it’s useful to note that some of the time the self-ideology aspect or the other-ideology aspect is more heavily foreground while the corresponding aspect is implied. That is, say, parents talking about themselves as parents are always in the subtext talking about children as well, even if that’s not foregrounded. Sometimes what’s foregrounded is usefully analyzed and sometimes the subtext is. I find Therborn’s terms helpful for conceptualizing that stuff or at least for calling attention to it.
Ah, I just remembered two other points I wanted to make, I have to be very brief. Therborn is polemical in his criticism of the concept of interest in a way I find fully convincing. Interests, he says as I recall it, refer to best outcomes against a kind of game or grid that we take as given. This involves at least two conceptual moves on the part of people who talk in terms of interests - one is a judgment about what counts as best outcome, and the other is the act of taking the game or grid - ie the social context - as given. What’s much more important, Therborn argues, is to examine the processes by which the games and grids, and thus actual subjects in the world, are composed. This often doesn’t happen due to what Therborn calls a utilitarian residue within marxism, one it would best to discard. Finally, I read around in his prior book, What The Ruling Class Does When It Rules. I wasn’t as into that one; it didn’t deal as much with issues I’m focused on at the moment. The bits I like are mostly fleshed out in more detail in this book. That book is still good, though, and I’m glad to have read what I read of it. The above is from memory (though I did look up the six place taxonomy - resignation, fear etc). Below are the notes and quotes I jotted down as I read the book.
Therborn stresses from the first page that his points are tentative and require further elaboration and substantiation. The book originated with his dissatisfaction with others’ treatments of ideology.
“Ideologies not only subject people to a given order. They also qualify them for conscious social action.” (vii) I’m not sure I get the latter.
He stresses ideologies as not contents or objects but “complex social processes of ‘interpellaction’ or address, speaking to us.” (vii) In a sense, then, ideology is the name for a category of verbs, acts.
“ideologies overlap, compete and clash, drown or reinforce each other” (vii) He points to the visual and auditory intensity of a busy urban street as an image of ideologies’ social co-existence. That’s the global view, so to speak. Where one’s standing in that space matters. One might be particular location in the street that makes a given sign loom larger or a given sound louder.
Therborn’s object is the ongoing life of ideology and its role in capitalist society. He emphasizes specifically “the role of ideology in class rule and class struggle.” (1) The work is, he says, in some ways a sequel to his What Does the Ruling Class Do When It Rules. [I should read that and write up notes on it; submit the notes as a post to Legal Form]
Ideology in Therborn’s use has no evaluative element - it doesn’t mean false or imaginary as opposed to real. Ideology instead is a matter of “that aspect of the human condition under which human beings live their lives as conscious actors in a world that makes sense of them to varying degrees. Ideology is the medium through which which this consciousness and meaningfulness operate.” (2) Ideology in this sense can include explicitly elaborated ideas in elite texts and other cultural objects, organizational practices and rules, vernacular terms and concepts, and experiences. It includes “both the ‘consciousness’ of social actors and the institutionalized thought-systems and discourses of a given society.” (2) To talk about ideology is to take on a particular analytical perspective: “to conceive of a text or an utterance as ideology is to focus on the way it operates in the formation and transformation of human subjectivity.” (2)
Therborn writes against the notion of interests as having explanatory power. “This notion of motivation by interest assumes that normative conceptions of what is good and bad and conceptions of what is possible and impossible are given in the reality of existence and are accessible only through true knowledge of the latter. (…) These are unwarranted and untenable assumptions. They represent a utilitarian residue in Marxism, which should be rejected” (5)
Therborn finds the category of ISA “rather dubious” and unfortunately “fashionable”. He claims that in private correspondence Althusser walked back from that concept as well. Still, Therborn thinks that Althusser’s emphasis on “the operation of ideology in terms of the formation of human subjectivity” and “conceiving it as a social process of address, or ‘interpellations’, inscribed in material social matrices” were important contributions. (7)
Therborn departs from Althusser in that he does not see ideology as false or a distortion. This fits with his saying that the ideology/science distinction should be abandoned. (10) Therborn also argue that Althusser did not adequately connect the analysis of ideology to class analysis. Althusser “omits the question of his classes are constituted as struggling forces, resisting exploitation or actively engaged in it.” (9) There’s a conceptual resonance here with work on class formation, I should make a mental note to follow that thread - important point of compatibility or even potentially mutually beneficial engagement between Althusserian and Thompsonian marxisms, also the Katznelson et al stuff.
Struggle and conflict are not a given in capitalism. Exploitation doesn’t necessarily lead to resistance. (9). Here too a point of resonance with Thompson. “Instead of trying to confront the problem of the ideological constitution of struggling class subjects, many Marxists have tended to fall back on the crude utilitarian notion of ‘interest.’ (…) ‘interests’ by themselves do not explain anything. ‘Interest’ is a normative concept indicating the most rational course of action in a predefined game, that is, in a situation in which gain and loss have already been defined. The problem to be explained, however, is how members of different classes come to defined the world and their situation and possibilities in it in a particular way.” (10)
Ideology constitutes and patterns “how human beings live their lives as conscious, reflecting initiators of acts in a structure, meaningful world.” It interpellates people as subjects. (15) To be clear, for Therborn this is plural, polyphonous - people don’t live just one way and aren’t interpellated just one way.
Ideology makes people subjects in two different senses simultaneously, it makes people “subjugated under a particular force or order” - subject in the sense of subjected to, like an object - and also makes people into “makers or creators” - subject in the sense of agency. (17)
Ideology always involves both subjection and qualification. (17.) I struggled to get what the latter means. People “become qualified to take up and perform (a particular part of) the repertoire of roles” in society. So qualified is a mix of permitted to perform, recognized as a performer, and equipped to perform somewhat successfully. So, a six year old in society today gets laughed at if they put on a fire fighter outfit, they are blocked from qualification there. Likewise an adult who put on kids clothing and went to a school playground would not fit into the category of elementary school student.
(I feel like there’s a resonance with Foucault here though it’s been a while since I’ve read him.)
There are “three fundamental modes of ideological interpellation”, namely what does/doesn’t exist, what is/isn’t good, and what is/isn’t possible. (18) Ideology constitutes people’s sense of these, and they tend to exist in a kind of ensemble or braid, with different of these ‘modes’ given more or less prominence. Each serves to defend a given social order or some aspect thereof. These modes of interpellation can also serve efforts to change something. (I would argue that sometimes efforts to change one thing are part of a process of preserving another: for instance, if there’s a rampant sexual harassment problem in a workplace and people focus on making that workplace greener, the cohesion produced by the latter may help prevent the former from causing serious problems for the organization or get people to not act on the former.)
I have repeatedly thought about Therborn’s ‘subject and qualify’. Lots of institutions do this and in changing ways; I think it’s accurate. Lots here on families and higher ed. Where the change originates - from above or below; no need to assume from below is anti-systemic though.
I read around in but did not thoroughly read Therborn’s What Does The Ruling Class Do When It Rules? I liked what I read but much of it applied to matters currently adjacent to what’s on my mind. I may return to it and read it closely later. Among what I liked: Therborn argues that there is an important difference between considering organizations including government agencies and other elements of the state, and the state as a whole, as “a goal-oriented subject in an environment” - i.e. as conscious and purposive - vs seeing the state or components of the state as “a formally bounded system of structured processes within a global system of societal processes.” (37.) The latter emphasizes the role of the state etc within social reproduction and, I’d say, treats it as both artifact of and constitutive element of a social totality. I’d stress both that the state and its components are market-dependent and so subjected to constraints, and (thus) that their actions are at least in part animated by a kind of social logic operating behind their backs.
In this book Therborn makes some similar points on ideology as his book on ideology though in very compressed form. (172.) It discusses social reproduction briefly, noting that society in some respects is social reproduction, that is, societies reproduce themselves as part of being a society. He notes three particular types of mechanisms of social reproduction - economic, state/political, and ideological. I appreciate this breadth, as distinct from some other more narrow uses of the term social reproduction. He notes as well that society’s reproduction is not the exact continuation of society unchanged, but rather the continuation of the fundamental elements of society, its basic structure. A second task of social reproduction he mentions is recruiting the perosnnel to play the parts allocated in the fundamental structure. (173-174). The specific “mechanisms of reproduction” are all at once sites wherein class struggle occurs, part of the stakes of class struggle, and interventions within class struggle. (173-174.)
He also implies that new techniques may arise for maintaining those fundamentals and for doing that recruiting (he discusses “new political technology” on 51 and “new techniques of bourgeois rule” on 53). His discussions of “plebiscitary politics” and of “managerial technocracy” (53-54) seem apt to the present. The former means something like personality politics and the role of politicians as individual charismatic celebrities, with the various rituals and practices involved. The latter, managerial technocracy, involves notions of expertise and technical approaches to rule. It differs from bureaucracy, though in that it is less strictly rule-/formal-rationality-bound and can decide on issues substantively.
He makes some similar criticisms of the concept of interests, saying for instance that for the most part the term when used to refer to “something other than factual preferences” largely serves “to provide a spurious objectivity to essentially ideological evaluations.” (P146)
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