The Truth about False Consciousness
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The Truth about False Consciousness Jason Myers Department of Politics, California State University, Stanislaus, 801 West Monte Vista Avenue, Turlock, CA 95382, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
As late as the mid-1970s the term ‘false consciousness’ was still applied by critical social theorists to instances of ideological delusion. Yet, in the wake of the postmodernist revolution and its neo-Nietzschean declaration of all truths to be merely truth-effects, a concept of false consciousness appeared impossible to sustain. Drawing on an incident in the history of South African politics, this article reconsiders the ways in which a concept of false consciousness, built upon a representational model of truth and falsity, might assist us in explaining the dynamics of ideological contestation. Contemporary Political Theory (2002) 1, 139–156. DOI: 10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300035 Keywords: ideology; false consciousness; Marxism; truth; nationalism
As late as the mid-1970s one could still find the term false consciousness being applied by critical social theorists to beliefs with which they found fault. Nothing today could seem more outdated. In the wake of the postmodernist revolution and its neo-Nietzschean declaration of all truths to be merely trutheffects, the falsity of belief becomes, rather than a criticism, an assumption: all beliefs are held to be equally true and equally false. Yet, for the field of ideology critique, concerned at its broadest with the relationship between ideas or images and political power, the retreat from truth and falsity F and the abandonment of a concept of false consciousness F has meant the erosion of our ability to specify conditions of ideological deception or delusion. The term originates in two short lines of Frederick Engels’ correspondence, in which he conceives of ideology as a type of delusion, clouding the mind of the thinking subject: Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, it is true, but with a false consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to him; otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process (Engels, 1978, 766). With little more than this to go on, the concept increasingly found its way into Marxist political thought as an explanation for various and sundry failings of class consciousness. In recent years, it has been resoundingly denounced on
Jason Myers The Truth about False Consciousness
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two grounds. First, as Eagleton (1991, 10–11) has pointed out, contemporary critical theory has become deeply suspicious of any proposed correspondence between ideas and material reality, which a theory of false consciousness would seem to depend upon. The idea of a single true or correct form of consciousness simply does not sit well with anyone these days, and while the poststructuralists may have initiated this retreat from epistemology, by the 1980s, few Marxists were in serious disagreement with it. Drawing on the work of Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser, authors such as Therborn (1980) and Callinicos (1985
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