Sweet lord, you play me false (1)

'Ideology', like 'culture,' seems to be one of those terms that are both indispensible and indefinable. There was recently a debate, of sorts, at Lenin’s Tomb about ideology and ‘false consciousness’. The term ‘false consciousness’, never used by Marx, is an Engels coinage:

Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all. Hence, he imagines false or apparent motives.

So, the questions raised were, firstly, is the notion of ‘false consciousness’ actually intelligible and, secondly, is there anything like a corresponding concept in Marx?

The notion that false consciousness might be meaningful didn’t have many takers. How can consciousness be ‘false’ – is it like a false leg or false teeth, someone asked caustically? This rather appealed to me, as if consciousness might be a some kind of prosthetic attachment, superimposed on the lame body, inorganic and uncanny. Here we have ‘false’ not as ‘incorrect’ but as ‘imitation,’ related to various other uses denoting deception, dissimulation, insincerity. ‘He’s so false’ can mean ‘he’s smarmy’ or ‘all appearance’, he is acting. If ‘false consciousness’ means anything, its unlikely that it has to do with dissembling or pretence, of acting only for the sake of ‘appearances’. Granted.

The reading that commonly comes out of the Engels quote, above, is that false consciousness refers (perhaps not very carefully or accurately) to how people are unaware of the real motives for their actions (or, sometimes, of the consequences and function of their actions). Whatever one thinks of such ideas (and they are often thought insidious*), it’s surely the case, just on an anecdotal level, that we in fact use something like them all the time, as when we say ‘I now realise I was doing it out of resentment/ jealousy etc’. Retrospectively, our behaviour is revealed to us as not coincident with our self-understanding at the time. Only afterwards – through the detour of 'painful experience' - are our ‘true’ motives available. Two things here though: it’s not that our ‘true motives’ were somehow there and fully articulated and we just covered them up. Also, our ‘self-understanding at the time’ wasn’t just a cognitive error that could be rectified in the same way that you could rectify the belief that badgers are amphibious.

One can begin to imagine, perhaps, how this notion of ‘false consciousness’ might be expanded beyond the level of individuals and individual psychology. For example, those ironists of the work place, who imagine themselves subversive, critically detached from the system, but whose stance is in fact the very pre-condition of the systems functioning. Here, its not so much a split between different levels of ‘motive’, but a split between - putting it roughly – individual consciousness and the requirements of the system:

'being ironic' about the orders grants you your small lease of subjective freedom, at the same time as you delegate all responsibility to the impersonal Orders, Directives etc of the Ideological machine. Better to be an instrument imbued with irony, than a fanatical adherent. Better not to 'assume responsibility' - an onerous and potentially psychosis inducing task - but to delegate it to the impersonal machine.

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One should also bear in mind, I think, that much of the language that we use to talk about such things – over-identification, and ‘subject positions’ etc etc was, obviously, not available to Marx, that he was surely moving towards concepts to which the given language was insufficient. This means that simply taking this insufficient language at the level of the letter might be to miss the potential of thought that was moving through that language, breaking it open and recasting it.
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The above should not be taken to imply that I’m in agreement with, or want to rescue the notion of ‘false consciousness’ as it stands. I’m interested in trying to tease out what such a notion might have been moving towards.

*Intuitively, people find this a rather insidious notion, taken to imply that others (the Party for example) have access to the ‘truth’ of one’s behaviour. A similar discomfort is expressed at the use of phrases like ‘objectively reactionary’, which again is taken to imply that the truth of your actions is not something with which you yourself are conversant. Irrespective of your perceptions and stated motives (I am acting out of pure benevolence), the reality of what you are doing exists on another level. (Personally, I think its perfectly meaningful to speak of things as ‘objectively reactionary’ etc, but I won’t go into that here.)