Lecture 24 Sociology 621 MYSTIFICATION December 7, 2011 In the next several sections we will follow up on more detail the distinction Thereborn made between three modes of interpellation: what is, what is good, what is possible. These distinctions correspond fairly well to a more traditional set of distinctions within Marxism between three different aspects of ideology or ways in which ideologies are understood: Ideology as Mystification = what exists Ideology as Legitimation or Normative Structure = what is good Ideology as Hegemony = what is possible 1. Definition of Mystification: 1.1 MYSTIFICATION = Distortions of perceptions of reality that mask/obscure that reality. Ideological practices produce human beings as social subjects by transforming “lived experiences” into subjectivity. Mystification concerns the ways in which cognitive understandings of “what exists” are formed out of our lived experiences, formed in such a way that they distort and mask the way the social world really works. 1.2 Mystification of nature: To illustrate the idea of mystification, consider a nonsocial example linked to what we might call “ideologies of nature”: We see the sun setting. This is the appearance, the lived experienced of our real relationship to the sun and earth. No matter how hard you try, you cannot see the earth rotating. In medieval society with its specific social structures and ideologies, the scientific understanding of the relationship between earth and sun was blocked by the natural ideology of nature that posed as science. People were burned at the stake for arguing that the sun was stationary. In capitalism, there is no obstacle in natural ideology any longer because of the character of capitalist social relations, and thus we can comfortably see the sun set, experience a sun rise, and yet know that it is fixed and the earth moves. This does not mean that our visual perceptions have chaned, but those perceptions no longer generate a subjective understanding of what exists that masks reality. As is clear from this example, the discussion of mystification immediately poses very murky epistemological issues: If we claim that people’s consciousness is false or their ideas about the world are distorted/incorrect, we must of necessity have some sort of standard of unfalse/true consciousness or undistorted/correct perception. This notion of ideology, thus, poses a contrast of ideology vs. science, which ultimately depends upon a sound theory of science.Lecture 24. Mystification 2 For the present I would like to suspend that discussion and just assume that somehow or another we will be able to adequately distinguish scientific understandings from ideologies. Here I would like to focus on the problem of mystification as a substantive issue and see what marxist theory has to say about it. The heart of Marxist discussions of mystification centers on the concepts of commodity fetishism and capital fetishism. But before I discuss these two rather complex concepts, I would like to give some simpler examples of mystification: 2. Social Examples of mystification 2.1. Individualistic explanations of individual acts. a. Poverty: We observe that some people are poor and some people are well off. We also observe that some people who are born poor become well off, and some do not. Since these people differ in their outcomes/fates, the cause of these outcomes must be born by the individual. Thus explanations of poverty are collapsed into explanations of why some people are poor and some not. The structural basis for the existence of poverty as such--exploitation, class domination, etc.--is opaque and ignored. b. Crime: This is an even more powerful example: individuals commit crime. They actively make a choice and act. Two people in the same socio-economic condition may make different choices, and thus the explanation for why one person commits a crime and another does not must lie in the differences between them. The explanation of Crime is reduced to the explanation of individual criminal acts. But, the possibility that the range of choices open to individuals is socially-structured independently of their wills, and that it is the structure of choice-ranges which determines the rate of crime, is again ignored. 2.2. Partial structural explanations of structural effects. It is not the case, of course, that structural explanations never enter accounts of social causation. On the one hand, social conditions are seen as relevant in the determination of individual attributes. In the popular consciousness, people do recognize that children of the rich are benefited by virtue of their social origins in the development of skills, personality capacities for competition, etc.; and culture of poverty analyses are commonplace for explaining why the poor are the way they are. And, on the other hand, in some instances, social outcomes are seen as directly shaped in some sense by social processes. Thus, people commonly see government spending as affecting inflation and unemployment. But what is not grasped in popular consciousness is the “conditions of possibility” of such partial effects, that is, the social structural context within which government spending has such effects. A very good example of this is the effect of mechanization of unemployment, loss of jobs, etc. People typically experience mechanization as itself a cause for the destruction of jobs, not understanding that capitalist relations of production are the “condition of possibility” of thisLecture 24. Mystification 3 outcome. Instead of mechanization releasing time from toil for all people, it releases some people from jobs altogether. 3. Fetishism Now let us look at commodity fetishism and capital fetishism: a. general meaning of fetishism: ascribing a power to something that it does not really have. b. commodity fetishism: Really not such a complicated notion. Commodities acquire value through a process of social labor, that is by virtue of them being produced as commodities within the capitalist labor process. But they appear to have this property only by virtue of their exchange with other commodities, that is by their relationship to another physical object. The social relation between producers thus takes the form of a relation between things. “It appears,” Cohen writes, “That (people) labor because their products have value,