In any case, your initial point about not everyone in communications insisting on economic reductionism and the ‘manufacturing consent’ thesis is amply demonstrated.

And you dismissed me before I dismissed you, so don’t be upset when I tell you that one of the marks of poor scholarship has always been the desire to quickly jump to a conclusion about a widely shared perspective upon hearing a limited description of that position. The idea of an enlightened false consciousness undergirding ideology has worked its way into a lot of scholarship, and while that is absolutely not evidence of any kind of validity on its own, it does mean that when somebody essentially laughs and dismisses it after reading a single paragraph, they’ve not really tried to understand it.

The intellectual generosity that leads to a question like “under what circumstances might this perspective make sense?” or “what elements of this picture do I need to see to understand why many people believe it makes sense?”—rather than concluding that a whole line of research spanning 30 years or so can be explained away by calling it circular reasoning with no explanation of why it is such—is generally the foundation of good scholarship whether the findings end up supporting a perspective or thoroughly dismantling it.

Now, you may have some critical insight that I’m absolutely blind to, but in that case your brilliance so surpasses me that you’re going to need to lay out your claims, grounds, and warrants in a little more detail than you have thus far to make a coherent argument.

Let me now explain a little more into where the enlightened false consciousness model fits into cultural studies (and in particular the study of ideology) so that my shorthand account of it might make more sense.

One of the commonplace theories of ideology that has come under a great deal of criticism is the false consciousness model: ideology is false consciousness. In this model, people support things that are not in their interests because they are deceived into not understanding what their interests are. The two main weaknesses of this model are (1) the assumption that people are so ignorant that they just can’t figure out their heads from their asses and (2) that there is some ideal way of understanding the world that people are missing; the model assumes a singular perspective which is wholly superior to any other perspective. This second problem is a major contributor to all kinds of historical oppressions from colonialism to slavery, and so it’s clearly not something we want to advocate as an implicit element of how we ought to critique and overcome whatever ideological blindspots we have. For a more detailed account of this model and its shortcomings, I recommend reading the first couple chapters of Terry Eagleton’s Ideology.

While there have been a number of alternate perspectives on ideology, one of them being the “manufactured consent” Michael points out as also inadequate (which, I might add, is a watered-down and significantly oversimplified version of the Frankfurt School’s critique of mass culture ), the one I mentioned is the “enlightened false consciousness” model. This perspective doesn’t claim that all ideology is enlightened false consciousness, but that at least it plays a major role in the docility of leftist politics in the post-’68 era (which Zizek would argue was the last moment that mainstream left politics were truly left). This perspective emerges out of Peter Sloterdijk’s book Critique of Cynical Reason. Sloterdijk claims that the teleology of “false consciousness”, which is typically “lies, errors, ideology” as he puts it, should have “cynicism” added as a fourth term. His critique is that many who are able to successfully identify many elements of ideological influence in everyday life are happy to take that awareness, become cynical about politics and the world, and treat their cynical disposition as though it were resistance in and of itself. Thus, exactly the kind of thing that leads people to watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report and conclude that by laughing at government and the media they are participating in resistance to their hegemonic shenanigans.
The result is that you have a lot of people more or less aware of their situation (thus “enlightened”), fully able to understand what their interests are and how they are unfairly suppressed in a number of ways, yet politically immobilized by the catharsis of feeling ironic and cynical about it (thus, a form of false consciousness again). The advantages of this perspective over the previous one is that it doesn’t assume that people are idiots, it allows for the critique of ideology to come from any number of situated perspectives (the critique is based upon the particulars of disempowerment and disenfranchisement as they are articulated to different groups and situations), and it therefore doesn’t support a “one right perspective” implication either.

Now, many could take this view as a critique of leftism and cultural studies in general and post-structuralism in particular for the relative weight it gives to “theory” as a means of overcoming injustice, but I don’t take it that way. I think a straw-man version of cultural studies and post-structuralism (both; I still know that they are distinct entities) is that both employ theory with no politics to back them up. When handled indelicately, they are sometimes taught that way or are sometimes understood that way by students; the reason all this thinking matters sometimes gets lost amongst all those huge tomes of theoretical musing. In short, I think the enlightened false consciousness model doesn’t critique the theory of the left, but it critiques the mistaken assumption that the theory undergirding the projects of cultural studies and post-structuralism is an end in-and-of itself rather than a middle step toward a different understanding of how we should understand and practice political interventions.

All of that may be a ton of hogwash, but if so it’s a more complicated hogwash than you have thus far proposed that it is.

Both approaches are actually—to my way of thinking, anyway—the artifacts of thinking of inquiry as something defined by one’s methodological commitments (or rejections, if you like). The study of politics, to pick my own field as an example, would be a lot healthier (and interesting) if most of those who did it thought of themselves in terms of their subject-matter and the problems and questions that set their research agendas, not their methods or their theories or their data. But method (and theory) are so intertwined with professional boundaries and institutional politics that it’s hard to get anyone to listen to that argument, because any methodological critique gets translated into a professional attack. And, like I said, that same parochialism arguably keeps people—especially those in the institutional margins—from feeling like their research is subject to anything like general rules for intellectual integrity (short of rules against outright fraud or open conflicts of interest), in the sense that anyone in or out of the unit in question can invoke those rules legitimately in criticism of that unit’s research.

JohnH, you have again provided a convenient example: I thought that such a clear account of a model like the ‘Sloterdijk/Zizek enlightened false consciousness model’, the causal logic of which as you depict it is so manifestly circular—I can’t imagine too many conditions short of violence that would disprove it—would on its face prompt any reasonably intelligent person to pause and say: ‘Hey, that’s pretty circular reasoning. Have you thought this through?’ So, I thought that your endorsement was tongue-in-cheek, and, even if your post was without irony, that a bit of snark about its circularity wasn’t out of order in making a point about institutional parochialism in re: the exercise of methodological critique.

But your hypothesis, that the reason its reasoning appears circular to me must be that I ‘don’t have much taste for cultural studies in general’, or for its notions of ‘methodological rigor’—and not that the reasoning is, well, circular—is a great example of how questions of method get elided with questions of professional allegiance in contemporary academia. (It’s another good example of circular reasoning, too.) What difference does it make, what difference should it make, what I think of cultural studies?

As you say, though, Maurice, Irigaray’s is not strictly a “cultural studies” argument (at least not in my book). One of them French-poststructuralist-psychoanalytic Lacanian-feminist arguments, yes, but tangential at best to the British tradition. But one of the latter-day troubles of cultural studies is precisely that the field has been dereferentialized beyond recognition. This too was our fault, insofar as back in the day (1980s-early 1990s), people were fond of insisting that cultural studies was not a discipline, and was in fact antidisciplinary—even though it really did constitute, for a couple of decades at least, a pretty coherent intellectual tradition, and even though (as Tony Bennett cheekily pointed out in 1994 or so) all the essays that began “cultural studies is diffuse and multifarious and a many-splendored thing that takes the shape of its container” proceeded to cite the same eight or ten Major Texts in their accounts of cultural studies’ history.

And to be a bit snarky (since you were with me), if you’re looking for refutation of the hypothesis that you suffer from false consciousness, chances are you suffer from false consciousness.

Zizek has a pretty favorable attitude toward violence, one which I don’t share because I’m not the revolutionary sort (there will be no big-bang of a revolution with guns and guillotines, but it will sneak up unannounced in more subtle ways), but no, I don’t think killing someone has anything to do with demonstrating that you’re not a victim of false consciousness.

I sense that you don’t have much taste for cultural studies in general, so maybe your critique has less to do with my post and more to do with your own idea of “methodological rigor.” If you’re looking for that in a one paragraph response to a blog post on the internet, then I’m afraid you’re doing it wrong.

Too many who criticize ‘cultural studies’ and anything involving fields of study that had no institutional homes in the 1950s simply because they are uncomfortable confronting certain realities about the world (racism, sexism, class privilege, and so on) or the way those realities influence the way they think. Others use methodological critique (the common charge of ‘insufficient rigor’ comes to mind) as a cover for the same kind of discomfort. But sometimes the methods and arguments associated with cultural studies really are questionable. Maybe not, strictly speaking, a cultural studies example, but Luce Irigary’s argument in ‘The sex that is not one’ that women’s thought processes are legitimately ambiguous and self-contradictory because of the form of their genitalia is another striking case in point.

By the way, this doesn’t let ‘traditional’ methodologists off the hook; they can be and frequently are equally goofy—they just have more numbers to hide behind. (The punchline to my favorite economics joke is, ‘Assume a can opener.’)

One of the consequences of institutional sequestration in the academy is that having substantive conversations across the lines of departments and programs about what ‘getting it right’ means, and about the practical obligations of the disinterested pursuit of truth, has become very difficult.

But I don’t mean to derail the thread—especially since Michael name-checked me! That made my day.

It’s certainly not ubiquitously true in communications either. As a communications doctoral student in rhetoric at a major institution, I haven’t really found this model to be bought into as much as the Sloterdijk/Zizek enlightened false consciousness model – people don’t misidentify their interests, in many cases they know very well that they are oppressed and can identify many of the mechanisms of that oppression, but adopting a cynical distance from that awareness is taken as a political stopping point – “because I watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, and I can laugh about economic and political indoctrination, I am doing something to resist it.” When the catharsis of irony is taken as resistance, that’s when you’ve got ideological hegemony.

Although we might not be returning your calls, this certainly isn’t true of sociology.

Preview is your friend!

I’m happy to say that at the recent Organization of American Historians meeting in Seattle, I attended a “state of the field” panel no the history of U.S. conservatism that suggested that we’re learning precisely the cultural studies lessons that Michael is worrying that the academy has forgotten (or perhaps never learned in the first place). One of the main themes in the papers and the discussion on that panel was a rejection of the economistic, What’s the Matter with Kansas false-consciousness explanation of the emergence of the Christian right in favor of a more nuanced view that tried to understand why, e.g., so many people living in a neoliberal economy might be particularly attracted to arguments in vigorous defense of “traditional” marriage. Such arguments complicate the picture both of neoliberalism (as it works at the local level) and of Christian conservatism, understanding each in the context of the other, rejecting reductive monism, and restoring agency to the people being studied. And that seems very much in the spirit of Stuart Hall.

I choose to keep the notion of classes; I choose to keep the notion of the capital/labor contradiction; I choose to keep the notion of social relations of production, etc.– I just don’t want to think them reductively. . . . My critique of marxism attempts to dethrone marxism from its guarantees, because I think that, as an ideological system, it has tried to construct its own guarantees. And I use the word “ideological” very deliberately. I think of marxism not as a framework for scientific analysis only but also as a way of helping you sleep well at night; it offers the guarantee that, although things don’t look simple at the moment, they really are simple in the end. You can’t see how the economy determines, but just have faith, it does determine in the last instance! The first clause wakes you up and the second puts you to sleep. It’s okay. I can nod off tonight, because in the last instance, though not just yesterday or today or tomorrow or as far as I can see forward in history, but in the last instance, just before the last trumpet, as St. Peter comes to the door, he’ll say, “the economy works.” I think those are very ideological guarantees. And as soon as you abandon that teleological structure under marxism, the whole classical edifice begins to rock. (“Toad” 72-73)

For more in this vein, see also “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees.”