Re: [xmca] ideology: easy access web page

[Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>]

Interesting. Good ol' Ralph Dumain comes up with the goods again!

There has been a lot of controversy about Engels's use of the term 
"false consciousness" and I take the consensus to be that even though 
Engels used the term a couple of times in personal letters in the last 
years of his life, it is not a concept which stands up to scrutiny, nor 
one used by Marx. It just happened that last night I was reading a 
manuscript by the German Marxist Thomas Metscher which cites the same 
passage we all go back to in the Preface to the Critique ... In 
reference to James Connolly's stance in relation to religion, he says:

   "He clearly shared Marx’s view that religion, along with the arts,
   the legal system, educational ideas, philosophy is an /ideological
   form/ (a form of institutionalised consciousness – not merely ‘false
   consciousness’) containing ‘true’ and ‘false’ components and
   performing different functions in different situations."

It was good to see that a German speaker read this passage the same way 
I have, because there are multiple translations of the passage. But if 
we take the line that ideology is institutionalised consciousness, or 
that institutionalisation is inherently an aspect of consciousness and 
each are inseparable from one another in general, then this problematic 
concept of "false consciousness" disappears. It is simply a matter of 
the practical critique of forms of social practice, of what deserves to 
be defended and what should be brought down.

Andy


mike cole wrote:
> Once Lucas set me off looking at that interesting webpage of Teun van Dijk,
> I realized that an inquiry
> into people's uses of the term, ideology, could take us ANYWHERE. So,
> thinking of anywhere, I thought in
> particular of Raymond Williams' KEYWORD which is on my home bookshelf, and
> sure enough, the entry there
> on ideology was interesting.
>
> Then I wondered if there was a web version so I could add that to the
> discussion in an easy-to-access way and,
> voila, as they say, I came up with the following;
>
> http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/ideo8.html
>
>
>
> mike
> _______________________________________________
> xmca mailing list
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>
>
>   

--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/
Videos: http://vimeo.com/user3478333/videos
Book: http://www.brill.nl/scss


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