Abstract
In Marxism, it is the material conditions that constitute and form the subject. The subject that emerges in relation to material conditions is an ideological subject. The chapter gives a concise introduction to Marxian materialism, while delineating the kinds of materiality that make up material conditions and investigating how exactly these materialities condition, determine, or affect the subject. To this end historical materialism, the metaphor of base and superstructure, as well as three different notions of ideology which are implicit in Marx’s writings are presented. Materiality is shown to be irreducible to physical, tangible matter and the subject should be seen as effect, rather than as starting point and origin of thought and action.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
Which does not mean that materialism is merely a derivative theory. As Coward and Ellis remark, ‘materialism… is not the simple opposite of idealism: it is the repressed of Western philosophy, in that it has never been dominant and that materialism can be found in contradictory moments of idealist philosophy’ (Coward and Ellis 1977, p. 83).
- 2.
- 3.
Idealists, such as Hegel and Fichte, might have emphasized that our activities (our interactions with the object-world) change the way we perceive reality, but idealism ‘does not know real, sensuous activity as such’ (Marx 2010, p. 3).
- 4.
Marx never used this term. It was coined later by Engels.
- 5.
To understand the materialist dialectic or the materialist conception of history as a simple inversions of Hegelian thought is, however, problematic, as we will see when we are concerned with the question of how material conditions determine consciousness and subjectivity (for a lengthier account of this problem, see e.g. Althusser 1969, pp. 88–128).
- 6.
Production can be defined as ‘the transformation of specific raw materials into specific products by labour using specific tools. It is productive activity that marks human society, and the form of the production of the material means of subsistence that finally determines the form of a particular society’ (Coward and Ellis 1977, p. 63).
- 7.
Material forces and not ideas. While in Hegel the same dialectical movement of contradiction and resolution drives history, it all happens in the ideal realm. And Hegel’s young antecedents, eager to change the world, thought that changed ideas—different views on the world—could revolutionize society.
- 8.
For an exposition of the different modes of production also see Marx et al. (1965, c1964).
- 9.
There is a ‘causal primacy to the mode of production over ideas/the ideological sphere in social life’ (Walker and Gray 2007, p. 214).
- 10.
The opening of The Communist Manifesto can be used to illustrate this: ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes’ (Marx and Engels 1998, p. 3). The class struggle ended either in revolution and a change in the mode of production or in the common ruin of the contending classes. No mechanical necessity guarantees the movement from one stage to another.
- 11.
Cf. Jameson (2002, p. 17).
- 12.
Terry Eagleton identifies 16 ‘definitions of ideology currently in circulation: (a) the process of production of meanings, signs and values in social life; (b) a body of ideas characteristic of a particular social group or class; (c) ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power; (d) false ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power; (e) systematically distorted communication; (f) that which offers a position for a subject; (g) forms of thought motivated by social interests; (h) identity thinking; (i) socially necessary illusion; (j) the conjuncture of discourse and power; (k) the medium in which conscious social actors make sense of their world; (l) action-oriented sets of beliefs; (m) the confusion of linguistic and phenomenal reality; (n) semiotic closure; (o) the indispensable medium in which individuals live out their relations to a social structure; (p) the process whereby social life is converted to a natural reality’ (Eagleton 1991, pp. 1–2). We could surely find more.
- 13.
There have been numerous attempts in recent years to refine the concept, some of which we will be dealing with at a later point. See, e.g. Badiou (2013), Ben Rafael (2003), Decker (2004), Rehmann (2013), and the contributions by Theborn, Bourdieu, Jameson, Eagleton, Rorty, and Žižek in Mapping Ideology (Žižek 1994).
- 14.
In other words: ‘Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc.—real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms’ (Marx and Engels 1965, p. 37).
- 15.
Which is not to say that something like false consciousness does not exist. For instance, claiming that global economic inequality is rooted in the biological inferiority of Africans and Asians or explaining it by saying that poor people are poor because they are lazy is certainly false. Just like thinking that the true problem is to be found in ‘classism’ and would disappear if we all stopped discriminating against the ‘less advantaged’.
- 16.
- 17.
In The Prison-House of Language, Jameson writes: ‘Internally, the structural limitation is nothing more than the total number of permutations and combinations inherently possible in the model in question; while the external limits are set by history itself, which pre-selects a certain number of structural possibilities for actualization, while proscribing others as inconceivable in the social and cultural climate of a given area’ (Jameson 1974, pp. 127–128).
- 18.
See, for example Living in End Times (Žižek 2011).
- 19.
Terry Eagleton illustrates this nicely: ‘The capitalist who has devoured all three volumes of Capital knows exactly what he is doing; but he continues to behave as though he did not, because his activity is caught up in the ‘objective’ fantasy of commodity fetishism’ (Eagleton 1991, p. 40).
- 20.
In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels write: ‘In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’ (Marx and Engels 1998, p. 26).
References
Adorno, T. W. (1999). Critical models. New York: Columbia University Press.
Adorno, T. W., & Horkheimer, M. (1997). Dialectic of enlightenment. London: Verso.
Althusser, L. (1969). For Marx. New York: Pantheon Books.
Althusser, L., & Balibar, E. (1997). Reading Capital. London: Verso.
Badiou, A. (2013). Theory of the subject. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Balibar, E. (2007). The philosophy of Marx. London: Verso.
Ben Rafael, E. (2003). Sociology and ideology. Leiden: Brill.
Coward, R., & Ellis, J. (1977). Language and materialism: Developments in semiology and the theory of the subject. London, Boston: Routledge & Paul.
Cowling, M., & Martin, J. (2002). Introduction. In K. Marx, M. Cowling, & J. Martin (Eds.), Marx’s eighteenth Brumaire: (Post)modern interpretations (pp. 1–15). London: Pluto Press.
Decker, J. M. (2004). Ideology. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Eagleton, T. (1991). Ideology: An introduction. London: Verso.
Engels, F. (1934). Engels to J. Bloch in Berlin. London, September 21, 1890. New International, 1(3), 81–85.
Jakubowski, F. (1990). Ideology and superstructure in historical materialism. London: Pluto.
Jameson, F. (1974). The prison-house of language: A critical account of structuralism and Russian formalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. London: Verso.
Jameson, F. (2002). The political unconscious: Narrative as a socially symbolic act. London: Routledge.
Jameson, F. (2004). Foreword. In J.-P. Sartre (Ed.), Critique of dialectical reason (pp. xiii–xxxiii). London: Verso.
Lukács, G. (1972). History and class consciousness. Boston: MIT Press.
Mantz, J. (2008). Materialism. In W. A. Darity (Ed.), International encyclopedia of the social sciences (pp. 18–21). Detroit: Macmillan Reference.
Marx, K. (1988). The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York, NY: International Publishers.
Marx, K. (1990). Capital: A critique of political economy. London: Penguin.
Marx, K. (1999). A contribution to the critique of political economy. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Marx, K. (2002). The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In M. Cowling & J. Martin (Eds.), Marx’s eighteenth Brumaire: (Post)modern interpretations (pp. 19–109). London: Pluto Press.
Marx, K. (2010). Theses on Feuerbach. In K. Marx and F. Engels (Eds.), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels works, April 1845–April 1847 (Vol. 5, pp. 3–5). London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1965). The German ideology. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (2010). Karl Marx and Frederick Engels works, April 1845–April 1847 (Vol. 5). London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Marx, K., Cohen, J., & Hobsbawm, E. J. (1965, c1964). Pre-capitalist economic formations. New York: International Publishers.
Reckwitz, A. (2002). The status of the “material” in theories of culture: From “social structure” to “artefacts”. Theory of Social Behaviour, 32(2), 195–217.
Rehmann, J. (2013). Theories of ideology: The powers of alienation and subjection. Brill: Boston.
Sartre, J.-P. (2004). Critique of dialectical reason. London: Verso.
Singer, P. (2000). Marx: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Walker, D. M., & Gray, D. (2007). Historical dictionary of Marxism. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.
Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Žižek, S. (Ed.). (1994). Mapping ideology. London: Verso.
Žižek, S. (2011). Living in the end times. London: Verso.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Beetz, J. (2016). The Materiality of Conditions and the Subject of Ideology. In: Materiality and Subject in Marxism, (Post-)Structuralism, and Material Semiotics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59837-0_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59837-0_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-59836-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-59837-0
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)