Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, in what may be considered to be one of the most systematic discussions ever of the concept of ideology, identifies eleven meanings of the term that are then grouped into two categories: on the one hand, ideology as false consciousness (critical-negative meaning) and, on the other, ideology as a vision of the world (positive-descriptive meaning).37 In the theoretical tradition of Marxism, which has probably offered the greatest number of definitions of ideology, such a distinction may be boiled down (of course, by trivializing it just like the majority of twentieth-century Marxism has done, in fact) to the difference between the Marx of The German Ideology – in which ideology inverts real relations – and the Lenin of What is to be Done? – which on the contrary refers to the opposition of socialist and bourgeois ideologies.38
If we had to place Gramsci in relation to these two positions, we would put him somewhere between the two: close to Marx’s position when he, Gramsci, acknowledges, in any case, the mystifying character of bourgeois ideologies, insofar as they are ‘instrument of government of
the dominant groups’.39 In this case, ideologies have a ‘rapid transience in that they tend to hide reality – namely struggle and contradiction’;40 they do not mystify reality as such, but rather its intrinsic contradic-tive nature, that is, the class struggle. Gramsci finds himself tending towards the latter position (that of Lenin), however, when, situating the concept within the framework of the class struggle – insofar as ideologies mainly ‘“organize” the human masses’41 –, he identifies a concept of truth that is not absolute, but is the result of political struggle. In fact, if the superstructures represent the level at which a ‘struggle of political
“hegemonies”’42 is fought, which determines people’s consciousness, and if the connection between theory and practice is constitutive of social activity, rather than having to be artificially created, then the result of the ideological struggle itself establishes the reality of people’s lives.
At this point we encounter the Gramscian argument criticizing the concept of the ‘objective reality of the external world’ as exemplified by Bukharin’s book – but originating from Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1908) – which presupposes the existence of an
‘objective’ external world that is independent of the subjects that inhabit it. In this conception, Gramsci finds traces both of the religious idea of God the Creator, who establishes the world before, and regardless of, Man, and of the naive metaphysics of philosophical materialism, which idealizes nature as an objective external entity.43 Here, reality is perceived as already formed, independent of and external to the subject, who can only try to perfect the cognitive means with which to master that reality.
Gramsci’s opposition to this theory does not consist of any idealistic subjectivism – despite not being a reductionist, he nevertheless remains within the materialist ranks – but of an objectivity of the real that can only exist in relation to the practice of ideological struggle:
Objective always means ‘humanly objective’ which can be held to correspond exactly to ‘historically subjective’: in other words, objective would mean ‘universal subjective’. Man knows objectively in so far as knowledge is real for the whole human race historically unified in a single unitary cultural system. But this process of historical unification takes place through the disappearance of the internal contradictions which tear apart human society, while these contradictions themselves are the condition for the formation of groups and for the birth of ideologies which are not concretely universal but are immediately
rendered transient by the practical origin of their substance. There exists therefore a struggle for objectivity (to free oneself from partial and fallacious ideologies) and this struggle is the same as the struggle for the cultural unification of the human race.44
With the ‘ideological problem’ defined in these terms, the debate over the intrinsic truth or falsehood of ideologies loses not only its interest, but also its meaning. In fact, the element that establishes the objectivity-truth of ideology becomes historically determined, ultimately corresponding to that of historical efficacy. An efficacy that is to be evaluated on the basis of the distinction between ‘historically organic ideologies’ and
‘arbitrary, rationalistic, “willed” ideologies’,45 as a counterpoint to the previously mentioned distinction between organic movements and conjunctural movements in relations of force: the former are necessary for a given structure – they constitute, as we have seen, its ‘skin’; the latter, on the other hand, are the result of ‘individual “movements”’46 that do not organize or mobilize people, but merely serve the interests of individuals or small groups.
At this point however, the concept of ideology reaches its point of maximum tension, as it finds itself describing a series of phenomena that share apparently contradictory features. In fact, on the one hand, Gramsci sees common sense, folklore and religion as powerful forms of a mystifying ideology; on the other hand, shunning reductionism and economism, he argues that such forms of consciousness possess their own historical ‘truth’, insofar as they are effectual.47 Likewise, he perceives the dangers of conceiving socialist ideology as being true, scientific and immutable, without any direct interaction with the historical struggle that ‘renders it valid’.48
Gramsci’s conception of ideology is debated within this very space characterized by the confrontation of the effectuality of those ideologies present with the struggle of future ideology to ‘prove its truthiness’. It is a productive concept for the very reason that it is forced to contend with the duplicity of its content that is determined, in each case, by the political struggle. This characteristic also distinguishes the concept of hegemony, which in fact is applied both in the analysis of the West’s
‘fortresses and emplacements’49 that prevent an East-style revolution and in relation to the transition to the hegemonic phase in the USSR with the New Economic Policy.50 It comes as no surprise to discover
that there is only one definition of ideology in the Prison Notebooks, where it is described as a ‘scientific, energetic, educational hypothesis that is verified <and criticized> by the real development of history, that is, it is turned into science’.51 This concise definition establishes certain fundamental principles, nonetheless:
• Firstly, it is a ‘hypothesis’, and thus it does not contain any principle of truth deriving from the position in the economic structure of the bearer of such ideology, but is open to a ‘truth procedure’.52
• It is of an ‘educational’ character, that is, it is strictly linked to the transformation of those subjects it affects, and is ‘energetic’ in that it acts as a stimulus to the transformational action.
• Thirdly, it is connected to the ‘real development of history’, and is thus susceptible to gradual adjustments and never formalized in any doctrine.
• Finally, ideology, during the practical ‘truth procedure’, must be ‘turned into science’, that is, it must contain all the elements required for scientific prevision, where the adjective ‘scientific’
means, as we shall see in the next section, a certain degree of objectivity (always understood as historically subjective).
At this point it should be noted that Gramsci’s pursuit of a suitable definition of ideology came at a time in history prior to the semantically heavy duty understanding of the concept that was to persist throughout the entire twentieth century – mediated by the famous Marxian metaphor – whereby ideology was seen as the inversion of reality.53 Ideology had not yet been conceived in such terms by Marxists writing during the period in which Gramsci drafted his notes. The concept in question was still undergoing formulation, its suggestive character still limited at that time, and as such it was open to other contiguous terms and concepts that placed the emphasis on other aspects of social reality, and that were utilized in the fields of philosophy, sociology or psychology. Thus, the Prison Notebooks offer a ‘conceptual constellation’ centring around the question of ideology. This constellation includes some of the concepts that have characterized Gramscian analysis, such as ‘hegemony’,
‘historical bloc’, ‘folklore’, ‘religion’, ‘philosophy’ and ‘science’, which we shall now examine at the points where they intersect.