Beyond Transcendence or Beyond Ideology: The New Problematics of Cultural Criticism in America

Abstract

Abstract If one were looking for a way to describe contemporary American literary and cultural studies, one could scarcely do better than associate it not, as in Daniel Bell’s phrase, with the “end of ideology,” but rather with its rebirth. By this I mean that almost everywhere in humanistic scholarship these days, one finds people exploring cultural mind-sets that are presumed to define the conceptual and emotional frames within which readers like writers, historical actors like historical interpreters, determine what constitutes meaning. Nor is this analysis of ideology the preoccupation of any particular school of interpretation or specialty alone. Concern with ideology is no more exclusively the preserve of neo-Marxists than of Derrideans, of Renaissance scholars or of gender critics. Instead it serves to focus the work of most contemporary thinkers who seek to relate the products of individual consciousness to more collective forms of mentality and to the systems of power that determine their significance. Contemporary interest in ideology has not, however, developed without certain problems of its own. One of them, though comparatively minor, is related to slippage in the term itself. In current American scholarship, for example, ideology refers to everything from ideas in the service of power to complex semiotic systems that, as Clifford Geertz has proposed, map the political world, simultaneously demarcating its boundaries and furnishing directions about how to move around within it.