Andrew Cole

Introduction: The Ideology Issue

Welcome to the ideology issue. Why is ideol-

ogy an issue at all? The better question is why
shouldn’t it be? Scholars, artists, architects, jour-
nalists, and activists around the world understand
that there are consequences to their practices,
that our words and works mean something to
ourselves—otherwise what’s the point?—and that
our efforts to make sense of the world can matter to
others, be they your friends, family, coworkers, or
the greater public. Our activisms and words, how-
ever, can also get us into trouble or cause serious
disruptions, locally and nationally. And in the same
way there are consequences to what we do, our proj-
ects are a consequence of the world in which we live.
Otherwise, there’d be no there there, nothing with
which to work, nothing to dream about improving,
or simply seeing anew because something seemed
off, wrong, and therefore worth rectifying.
Consequences are the fundamental issue
about ideology. Call them causes and effects. For
all of its long history of usage since the late eigh-
teenth century, ranging in meaning from the “nat-
ural history of ideas” and “delusion” to “values”
and “enjoyment,” the term ideology boils down to
the problem of causes and effects. What the con-
cept of ideology brings to the older scholastic

The South Atlantic Quarterly 119:4, October 2020

doi 10.1215/00382876-8663554 © 2020 Duke University Press

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 668 The South Atlantic Quarterly • October 2020

conversations about these two categories—as well as to the even older mus-
ings about fate or destiny—is an emphasis on their distinct sociality or, bet-
ter, the institutional, political, and economic significance of what determines
us in our own willful determinations and what limits our efforts to break
through and change things. Baby steps, though.
To begin with, ideology, as an operative term, reminds us that a portion
of what we say has been said before, that a good deal of what we think has
been thought already, that some of what we do has been done previously, not
only by people in the past long before us but also by people today, right now,
both near and far. In other words, it’s relatively easy to acknowledge that
we’ve carried on doing things a certain way from the previous generation,
that we follow traditions, even if our actions aren’t called that or recognized
as such. But the term ideology makes this common insight a lot more chal-
lenging because it forces you to face yourself in the present. For the most
part we feel free, in the moment, as living, breathing individuals. Yet, the
quality of that experience—spontaneous and idiosyncratic—always has a
quantitative complement. That is, sure as day, there’s a minimum amount of
individuals feeling exactly the same as you and their number eventually
adds up to a generality in which you suddenly seem like all of them, all of the
rest, whether you know it or not, or like it or not.
Ideology is a magic number, a peculiar quality of quantity—a sum
greater than the total of parts. In other words, ideology works by not adding
up or making sense. That’s why one of the everlasting problems of ideology
is that even though people know what’s best for themselves, they—puz-
zlingly and annoyingly even—do their worst, especially if it means acting
against their own self-interest in the long run to screw someone over in the
short term. It’s frequently said that ideology is a remainder, an irreducibly
irrational element or kernel that eludes explanation or representation, such
as behavior like this. That’s true, though this problem of ideology as remain-
der could be cast in another way. Verily, in terms of explaining the inexplica-
ble, the term ideology is like the last person standing, the one holding the bag
left to clarify just how a mob of so many human tendencies—like idiocy,
indifference, helplessness, hopelessness, vulnerability, fragility, need, resent-
ment, paranoia, narcissism, prejudice, superstition, religion, error, disinhi-
bition, anger, tribalism, hate, brutality—can coerce truth, knowledge, even
science, into giving in; or how the latter three find the former absolutely
unshakeable and incorrigible. If there exists a better single term for this phe-
nomenon and problem, then many readers would be glad to hear it.

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 Cole • Introduction 669

Ideology will make an existentialist out of anyone. And that’s one

option to pursue, for the word ideology picks out existential problems in a
specific way, with students of the term using pairings like “the universal and
the particular” or ideas like “inscription,” “interpellation,” and “over-deter-
mination” (which pluralizes old-school determination) to explain how ideol-
ogy wends its way into our heads. However ideology shapes our thoughts,
and just where the line lies between original ideas and ideology loaded with
everyone else’s, it can be said that ideology has perfected the art of transmut-
ing our individuality, our individual peculiarities, into a collective identity
just as, on a higher level of abstraction, it transforms our group identities
into social differences. It’s why classism, sexism, and racism—any of the
isms, really—are rightly called ideologies, for ideology targets us, weapon-
izes us, or both. But it excludes no one, which is a social fact almost everyone
finds (or should find) hard to accept without feeling that it’s the word itself
that does violence to them and thus needs to be expunged from our conver-
sations. Indeed, to reject the critique of ideology because it attends to all that
damages and distorts, or because it often makes art less beautiful or litera-
ture less lovely—though never less important—is like confusing the critique
of racism for racism, as when activists or certain journalists are accused of
playing the race card when speaking on the injustices of the carceral state.
That we are urged to return to enjoying resplendent forms and let politics
slide in our academic work is just another way of snarking, “why can’t you
just have some fun for once?!” (This is why the politics of enjoyment is often
an unrecognized death drive.)
If the problem of ideology compels you to face yourself, the critique
of ideology motivates you to face the world, which is always more than a
composite of family, neighborhood, school, place of worship, law and law
enforcement, history, culture, society, what have you. The total that exceeds
these instances—thus giving them space to be distinct from one another—
is that sum greater than its parts, that totality called capitalism, which
doesn’t bring all of these domains of life into being so much as it leaves not
a single one untouched. Does this mean that capitalism is ideology? Not nec-
essarily, though I wouldn’t stop anyone from saying so. The point is that if
we are going to speak of ideology, then we have to speak of capitalism. For it’s
in capitalism—and in modernity generally—that the problem of ideology
begins, where unrelated areas of life that don’t seem overtly political or
for that matter economic are nonetheless ideological in the way they talk
the talk and walk the walk of capitalism. It’s to say that while ideology

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 670 The South Atlantic Quarterly • October 2020

isn’t capitalism, it is of capitalism. After all, it’s in early capitalism that the
word was invented. And it’s in late capitalism that, we’re told, ideology has
come to an end, along with the critique of ideology. It’s for the spokespersons
of those latter ideas—yes, they’re around—to justify why they express the
deepest wish fulfillment of capitalism. Meanwhile, it’s for the authors of this
special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly to demonstrate just why the problem
of ideology, and especially the critique of ideology and of capitalism, is vital
now more than ever, in our pages and our practices.

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