That Obscure Object of Ideology

I had planned a number of posts dealing with the seemingly obsolete concept of ‘false consciousness’, but as the 'first in the series' produced little in the way of interested responses, my enthusiasm withered. However, what follows is just a quick note and one which has as its backdrop the following well-known quotation:

With the change of the economic foundation of the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations, a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic -- in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness

There is a question here as to exactly what force ‘ideological’ has in the above statement. If you remove ‘ideological’ what is lost? What makes the ‘forms’ ideological?

I don’t want to answer these questions directly, only to comment on what seems to be the basic distinction: between what a thing or process is and the ways in which it appears/ is perceived or experienced by its participants. And perhaps ‘false consciousness’ is first of all the name for the gap between these two.

Again, the most ready-made examples spring from the pages of psychology books – wherein we might say a hatred of the father takes the form of excessive reverence, or where the collector’s obsession is the form taken by an unresolved anal fixation (these are just a couple of cartoon examples for illustrative purposes). The form/ content distinction here is recurrent and crucial in Marx's thinking (I'd be interested if anyone knows of books essays on this particular topic).

‘False consciousness’, then, might name a kind of interference between content and form, with the latter both expressing and blocking or scrambling the former – the content is prevented from being fully present in the form, and it is this interference or blockage which is the object of consideration for those thinking about ideology.

Needless to say, this form is not ‘false’ if by that we mean either ‘incorrect’ or, more interestingly and more humorously, ‘fake’. Taken literally, it may be hard to extract a useable meaning from Engels’ phrase. But, again, one needs to bring the form/content distinction to bear on ideas like ‘false consciousness’ itself; ie., as an idea it may not be identical with the form in which it came to expression. If that form now seems rather antiquated, couched in a language encrusted with nineteenth century assumptions, there might nonetheless be something worth rescuing – a content which surpasses the form.

There are reasons for not taking Engels’ proposition in isolation. It should, rather, be seen as one of a number of failed or incomplete conceptualisations of ‘ideology’ in Marx and Engels - as if they are repeatedly grasping at something the nature of which stubbornly eludes them. In other words the sheer plurality of Marx’s attempts to conceptualise ideology is an object of interest in its own right, so that the question to ask might be: what is this stubborn problem around which Marx circles, what is this mark that seems to be so consistently missed?