Ideology might have dropped out of fashion as a concept in academic use. Yet the urgent search for the reasons behind social injustice and privilege calls for a reconsideration of this aged concept. Meeting roughly every two weeks from November 2023 until May 2024 a group of eikones members explored a corpus of texts that deal with the concept of ideology in philosophical and art theoretical terms. Wacyl Azzouz, Paula Stoica and Hella Wiedmer-Newman put together a syllabus tracing the history of the concept from its very beginnings in the Enlightenment right up to recent developments in Critical Theory. What follows below is a kind of postscript, a series of recollections from each participant in the reading circle.

You can find the reading list at the bottom of the post.

Paula Stoica: The idea of engaging more deeply with the notion of ideology and its relationship to art was sparked, for me, by T.J. Clark's 1974 article "The Conditions of Artistic Creation". A few months later, the reading group was formed and set out to explore what ideology is. Here, I wish to return to Clark's seminal text to outline what is at stake when posing the question of art and ideology in an art historical context and beyond.

Clark begins his argument by declaring that art history is in "a state of genteel dissolution." By failing to ask relevant questions, art history has lost its poignancy in tackling societal issues. Gone are the days when philosophers like Georg Lukacs pointed to the art historical scholarship of Alois Riegl and Max Dvorak as examples of posing relevant questions about consciousness and representation. And yet, Clark doesn't argue for a return to these very questions, as this would imply the reintroduction of certain problematic art historical categories (like the artist as creator). Instead, Clark suggests that art history explore the intimate relationship between art and ideology.

The question of art and ideology is thus a fundamental one, since, according to Clark, art is located at the center of the making and unmaking of ideologies : "Ideology is what the picture is, and what the picture is not." Regardless of the artistic production being imbued with ideology, actually producing the work is essential, for, on the one hand, operating with ideological means, materials and contents opens up the possibility of rendering ideology visible to some extent. And it is where the picture shows inconsistencies that ideology becomes discernible. On the other hand, artistic production brings to the fore the subjectivity of the artist as one who has been formed in a specific socio-historical context by a specific milieu and its ideologies, and whose incorporation of specific ideological content or artistic material points to these very formative forces.

And it is precisely the insistence on historicity and on specific constellations that, in my opinion, keeps this approach productive and versatile. The study of artistic production and its conditions provides insights into how ideologies work, into their dynamics, how they reproduce themselves, how they evolve or adapt, and ultimately how they shape us, our world, and our relationship to the world. Art seems to be a privileged domain of human activity for investigating these crucial issues.

Hella Wiedmer-Newman: My aim in co-founding the Ideology is Bliss reading group was to find ways of thinking about the ideological narratives spun by those in power past and present; ideologies the best artists, in my view, continuously attempt to expose and challenge. As countries around the world entertain radical right-wing governments, which in their hate-filled rhetoric and illiberal actions teeter dangerously on the edge of authoritarianism, and threaten to dive into totalitarianism, I look to Hannah Arendt for guidance.

In the chapter “Ideology and Terror” of her 1951 tome The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt looks back from her historical perch of the Cold War to analyze the mechanisms that led to the Second World War and the Holocaust, and which have ushered in, in her words, an “entirely new form of government” (327). Totalitarianism, she argues, is more than simply a modern form of tyranny because its rule is not chaotic, but rather deeply organized; Totalitarianism has done away with the distinction between lawfulness and lawlessness, and instead operates according to its own conceptions of the laws of nature or the laws of history. These laws establish winners and losers. But, as she points out, these categories are not stable and neither are the reasons a specific group of people might be constructed as loser or, indeed, villain. One thinks of David Baddiel’s assertion that Jews are always the signifier for whatever is seen as the world’s ills, whether it be communism, capitalism or state violence. So, the operations of totalitarianism are ideological in so far as they sublimate the chaos of the exterminatory impulse into a state of pure order and logic according to a clear narrative. This is consistent with Marx’s notion of false consciousness, but in my opinion Arendt goes further still.

Arendt is as interested in the mechanics of ideology under totalitarianism, as in its manifestations. Ideologies are “…isms which to the satisfaction of their adherence can explain everything and every occurrence by deducing it from a single premise… they combine the scientific approach with results of philosophical relevance and pretend to be scientific philosophy.” We hear in this definition the echoes of the original Enlightenment-era ideologues. As George Lichtheim explains in his 1965 text The concept of ideology, the term “ideology” was first used by the philosopher Antoine Destutt de Tracy during the French Revolution to describe a group of scholars, the “ideologists,” who espoused freedom of thought and expression as the principal revolutionary gains. They were interested in ideas and in “placing the ‘ideal’ aims (their own) ahead of the ‘material’ interests on which the post-revolutionary society rested” (166). The forerunners of positivism, they opposed metaphysics through a kind of science of ideas, but modern totalitarianism uses the notion that it itself is logical to make its operations seem inevitable. “Dialectical logic, with its process from thesis through antithesis to synthesis which in turn becomes the thesis of the next dialectical movement,” Arendt goes on “is not different in principle, once an ideology gets hold of it; the first thesis becomes the premise and its advantage for ideological explanation is that this dialectical device can explain away factual contradictions as stages of one identical, consistent movement.” I think here of the words of war and genocide deniers and relativizers, performing inexorable contortions of self-justification and always choosing which mass graves to weep over and which to ignore.

By delving into the texts with a wonderful group of interlocutors, I have learned to be critical, but most importantly, to be suspicious of those promulgating their ideas as the most logical or rational without room for the dialectical or the ambivalent.

Wacyl Azzouz: After spending some time reading the texts in our small group (and of course without remembering all the texts in exact detail), what I remember best is reading Adorno’s short text Contribution to the Theory of Ideology alongside Arendt’s passages on the concept of ideology in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Adorno and Arendt ask completely different questions about the concept of ideology. In the chapter on ideology and terror, Arendt’s interest in the concept of ideology lies mainly in the question of the totalitarian elements of ideologies and the role ideologies play in totalitarian regimes. She even claims that it is only from the role of ideologies in totalitarian regimes, that “the real nature of all ideologies” is revealed. This is very different from Adorno’s Contribution to the Theory of Ideology. His text is more concerned with the movement of the concept of ideology and its transformation throughout history. For Adorno, there is no such intimate connection between ideology and totalitarianism. Even more so, there is not even really an ideology of totalitarian regimes. However, it was Arendt’s concept of loneliness that left a stronger impression – and this is where Arendt and Adorno might be much closer. It seems as if Arendt and Adorno agree on the – maybe more fundamental – question here: It is the question of the social conditions that prepare people for a totalitarian regime and its (so-called) ideology in the first place. Arendt’s concept of loneliness and what Adorno sometimes describes as “bourgeois coldness” are obviously related to this question. The affinity between these two concepts – but also how different they are, has somehow stuck with me ever since.

Veronica Locatelli: “Non è l’argomento, è l’espressione! … Come parlaaaaaa? Le parole sono importanti!!” (It isn’t the subject. It’s the way you put it! … What language is that? Words are important!!). In the 1989 film Palombella Rossa (Red Wood Pigeon), Nanni Moretti’s alter ego Michele Apicella slaps a young journalist for using an unfortunate turn of phrase  during an interview [see image above]. It’s not (just) the question she asks that matters, even if impolite and inappropriate, but the way she reports the facts that upsets him. In that environment, by the side of a sunny swimming pool located somewhere in the lazy suburbs of Rome, the scene appears to be a postmodern translation of the semiological scheme that Roland Barthes (Cherbourg-Octeville 1915 — Paris 1980) drew in his Mythologies at the end of the 1950s (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1957).

In fact, Barthes’ text brings to the fore the theme of the ideological power of language, revealing its mechanisms within a society on the threshold of the transition from the economic boom to the explosion of mass capitalism. Recurring to popular visual references, it explains how ideology works as a vector of its message through language.

According to Barthes, mythology is related to language, and it defines how a specific use of speech can transform everyday, ordinary things into myths. To do so, language — be it verbal, visual or physical — must operate in a social context (history) able to recognize the output of the process: the path from thing to myth runs through a signifying flow based on a transformational dimension. If in the context of language the sign is the point of convergence of signifier (concept) and signified (image), in mythological speech the first degree sign, already loaded with meaning, becomes the raw material for the “second-order-semiological system”: along with the second level of the signified it produces a new, intensified sign.

In the realm of myth, the signifier transforms itself from meaning to form: in doing so and in conjunction with the concept, the sign turns into a signification that both “points out and (it) notifies, it makes us understand something and it imposes it on us”. I wonder if this same construction of meanings and meta meanings, mingling essence and appearance, could have been produced outside the consumer society — and the examples Barthes recurs to in the first part of the book seem to confirm this hypothesis.

The excerpt from Mythologies selected for the Ideology is Bliss reading group at eikones makes me think of the root of the new approach of criticism that developed in the early 1960s and then deflagrated in ‘68. Words can and shall be used not just as theoretical means, but as militant tools, that lead to a rediscovery of the political and ideological role of criticism in capitalist society. Words are important because they are the first moment of epiphany of thought and they carry with them a stratification of meanings, both high and low (let’s think of Umberto Eco’s oeuvre or the Arte Povera movement).

That’s how Barthes’ Mythologies is linked to Apicella/Moretti’s statement: in the impossible neutrality of language in capitalist society. “It isn’t the subject. It’s the way you put it!”

Simon Lindner: Out of all the texts that we read, it was Louis Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (first published 1970) that resonated with me the most. For Althusser, ideology means the functioning of “ideological apparatuses” that reproduce subjects. This is a Neomarxist move shifting scholarly attention away from the means of production and towards the reproduction of the means of production. And as Althusser identifies labor power as such to be the most important means of production, he takes aim at the reproduction of subjects (be that either the worker or the bourgeois). Therefore, his prime examples of “ideological apparatuses” are institutions that educate and “produce” subjects: family and school, and to a diminishing extent in modern times also the church. These “apparatuses” predetermine certain regular practices, including kneeling and praying in church, naming a baby, or completing a curriculum. These regulated practices or rituals constitute a subject as soon as individuals participate in them and identify with them. Althusser stresses that we cannot talk about a “subject” existing prior to an individual's subjection to a certain set of regular practices, acts or “ideological apparatuses”. The “elementary ideological effect”, Althusser points out, is the “obviousness” of the statement that we are in fact subjects. To illustrate this, he gives a peculiar example addressing his own involvement in ideological practices: the philosophical text that he has written and that we are reading. It is “obvious” that he is the author of the present text and that we are the “reader” following his moves as a “subject of scientific discourse”. The peculiarity of ideology then lies in its imposition of “obviousness as obviousness, which we cannot fail to recognize”.

The question I am wondering about is this: If ideologies are so pervasive and inescapable, what is Althusser hoping to achieve with writing this text? He cannot be content with simply providing yet one more exercise in philosophical reading which reproduces his own and his readers’ subjection to the “ideological apparatus” of the academic discipline. Althusser hints at an alternative when he addresses a “rare minority” of teachers: “I ask the pardon of those teachers who, in dreadful conditions, attempt to turn the few weapons they can find in the history and learning they ‘teach’ against the ideology, the system and the practices in which they are trapped. They are a kind of hero.” Would Althusser also have liked to count himself among those who turn on “ideological apparatuses”? The quote suggests that heroic action is not limited to violent or revolutionary class struggle but also possible in the form of minor subversive deviations within “functioning apparatuses” such as the classroom.

Reading list in the order of our reading

George Lichtheim, «The Concept of Ideology», in: History and Theory, 4:2 (1965), S. 164–195.

Emmet Kennedy, «‘Ideology’ from Destutt de Tracy to Marx», in: Journal of the History of Ideas, 40:3 (1979), S. 353–368.

Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels, Die Deutsche Ideologie, in: MEW Bd. 3, “Vorrede” und Kap. 1: “Feuerbach. Gegensatz von materialistischer und idealistischer Anschauung”, S. 13–77.

Georg Lukacs, «Klassenbewusstsein», in: Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein. Studien über marxistische Dialektik, S. 69–95.

Antonio Gramsci, Gefängnis Hefte.

Max Horkheimer, «Ideologie und Handeln», in: GS vol. 7, p. 11–21.

Theodor W. Adorno, «Beitrag zur Ideologienlehre», in: GS Bd. 8, S. 457‒477.

Hannah Arendt, «Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government», in: (Dies.), The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York 1973, S. 460‒479.

Louis Althusser, «Ideologie und ideologische Staatsapparate», hrsg. von Frieder Otto Wolf, 2010, 1. Halbband, S. 37–102.

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York/London 2002, S. 3‒44.

Silvia Federici, «Ideologie und Feminismus», in: Eva Birkenstock, Max Jorge, Hinderer Cruz, Jens Kastner, Ruth Sonderegger (Hrsg.), Kunst und Ideologiekritik nach 1989, Köln 2014, S. 131f.

T.J. Clark, «The Conditions of Artistic Production», 1974 (reprint Selva: online verfügbar).

Kerstin Stakemeier, «Entkunstung diesseits der Kunst – Ideologiekritik, Autonomie und Reproduktion», in: Eva Birkenstock, Max Jorge, Hinderer Cruz, Jens Kastner, Ruth Sonderegger (Hrsg.), Kunst und Ideologiekritik nach 1989, Köln 2014, S. 107 –118.

Jacques Rancière, «On the Theory of Ideology (the Politics of Althusser)», available online.

Stuart Hall, «The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Garantees [1983]», in: Selected Writings on Marxism, hrsg. von Gregor McLennan, 2021.

Roland Barthes, Mythologies, London 1974, S. 109 ff.