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DOROTHY E SMITH AND INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY

2.3 Contextualising Institutional Ethnography

2.4.3 Smith and The German Ideology

Smith (2004) states that as a feminist sociologist she has been profoundly influenced by her own interpretation of Marx’s materialist method as set out in the German Ideology. In her 2004 article Ideology, Science and Social Relations, A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Epistemology, she explores her own interpretation of Marx’s epistemology, which, she argues, is substantially different from the way in which it is generally viewed, and which also differs from the androcentric and objectifying training that replicates the ruling relations, which she received in her own training. Smith makes no claims to holding any authority with her interpretation, nor does she offer any general understanding of Marx; what she is concerned with is his method, stated clearly and systematically in The German Ideology. Smith’s central argument rests on the publication of TheGerman Ideology in its entirety, pointing out that most publications are selective in what is actually published, usually omitting several hundred pages of detailed critique on the German ideologists. Smith argues that most of the ideas referred to in the first part of the text directly refer to the critique in the second part, and as it is the second part that is so often not published this could account for the many misinterpretations that have been argued about over the years.

Smith reads Marx as not specifically developing a theory of ideology in the sense that some later Marxists, or indeed many of his critics have assumed (see also Eagleton 1991). Indeed, she argues that the profound confusion in the concept of ideology (as argued by Williams 1977, and quoted in Smith 2004:448) is that there is “no confusion”. Rather, Smith interprets Marx as developing a critique of the ways in which the German Ideologists or philosophers thought, along with their methods of philosophising. Importantly, this also amounted to a self-critique for Marx, and thus a self-clarification (ibid:453). Smith’s primary concern is with Marx’s methodology, his way of looking at, or conceiving society, his ideas on the way knowledge was constructed and produced, and his development of a scientific or empirical method. This method, for Marx, was able to locate the actual ways in which social relations were objectified from material conditions, abstracted into categories and ideological concepts and then re-presented back to the social

as natural conditions from which consciousness, policy and governing then stemmed (Smith 2004).

According to Smith, what Marx and Engels were critiquing in The German Ideology was the ideologists’ method of reasoning: “ideology is a definite practice of reasoning.” (ibid:452) The following passage from Rudolph Matthai exemplifies Marx’s criticism of the German Ideologists:

Man’s struggle with nature is based upon the polar opposition of my particular life to, and its interaction with, the world of nature in general. When this struggle appears as conscious activity, it is termed labour. (quoted by Marx & Engels 1976:508, in Smith 2004:452)

Marx has no problem with ‘labour’ as conscious activity, but what he does take issue with is the method of reasoning that locates the concept of labour as primary and the actual activity of labour as its manifestation. Marx illustrates this flawed method as follows:

First of all, an abstraction is made from a fact; then it is declared that the fact is based upon the abstraction…:

For example: Fact: The cat eats the mouse.

Reflection: Cat-nature, mouse-nature, consumption of mouse by cat = consumption of nature by nature = self- consumption of nature.

Philosophic Presentation of the Fact: Devouring of the mouse by the cat is based upon the self-consumption of nature. (Marx & Engels, 1976:508, in Smith 2004:453)

Of course this is parody, but its absurdity helps to understand abstracted ways of thinking. Ideologies, then, build on categories that do indeed express actual social relations; however, the direction of thinking shifts away from investigations into the actuality reflected and expressed in those categories.

When looked at in this way it becomes clear that all disciplines, for example, political theory or economic theory are merely reflections of actual social relations worked up in to the practice of ideological methods of thinking and reasoning. Importantly, in the case of economic categories, Marx argues that these are abstractions of the social relations of production, i.e. private

property and a capitalist mode of production. Indeed, by the time he came to write Das Capital, Marx was clearly continuing with the reasoning fundamental to his materialist method, which is evidenced in its grounding of concepts and categories regarding labour, waged labour and commodification. As such, economic categories can effectively map the historically determined modes of production, but whilst they are able to identify sites for investigation they are unable to open them up. Nevertheless, these abstracted categories and disciplines are given privileged status and work to organise social relations themselves (ibid).

Smith also argues that though relations determine the categories, they do not determine the thinker. The subject or knower’s consciousness is determined by her activity, through language as social and active. Clearly, language is central to social relations and to the categories and ideologies that build on them and then express them back to us. But the organisation of social relations through disciplines and other institutions is necessarily also organised through language. Language and discourse are a major medium through which we know our social world, but what is visible to us, what we can speak of, and what we have access to is also socially organised:

There is an actual organization of social relations which generates or determines what appears to people – the jurist for whom ideas appear to rule; the philosopher for whom reality is an object of contemplation – these are experiences arising in definite social relations that are given theoretical expression. The ideological forms of thought express these relations but reconstruct them ‘speculatively’. (Smith 2004:455)

The role of language and discourse in shaping what is visible to us is especially relevant in the Foucaultian sense. Foucault picked up Marx’s critique of ideological reasoning, abstraction and objectification, and devised an archaeological method through which to map the ways in which objectified concepts and disciplines were given legitimacy.

Foucault’s work thus plays an important role in the rationale underpinning Smith’s conception of IE and the next section sets out the salient aspects of his work that have a direct influence.