Ideology and culture

Finding a pragmatic exit from the semantic labyrinth surrounding ‘ideology’ and ‘culture’, this article considers the neutral connotations of ‘ideology’ as a formative, intrinsically paradoxical, constituent of culture, and argues that the heterogeneous, volatile, and contested nature of all ideologies when viewed through some postmodernist lenses is their hallmark only under the historically exceptional societal conditions of high modernity. It moves on to consider the virtues of several non-reductionist variants of Marxist theory that postulate a subtle dialectic between ideology's coercive and emancipatory functions, aspects that can be seen at work at the generative and experiential core of all human cultures, and not just capitalist ones. These reflections lead to a call for a dialectical, anthropologically informed approach to the interface between culture and ideology. It concludes on a speculative note by suggesting that analogies made between ideological self-replication in cultural processes and the genetic basis of evolution could be more than metaphorical should the infant science of ‘memetics’ prove to have an empirically sound base.