On waging the ideological war: Against the hegemony of form. (September 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Narotzky, Susana
• Editors: Reyna, Stephen; Eckert, Julia; Schiller, Nina Glick
• Is Part Of: Anthropological theory. Volume 16:Number 2/3(2016)
• Page Start: 263
• Page End: 284
• Publication Date: 2016-09
• Subjects: austrian school -- hegemony -- ideology -- post-structuralist epistemologies -- social mobilization -- solidarity; Anthropology -- Philosophy -- Periodicals; Anthropology -- Periodicals; Sociology -- Philosophy -- Periodicals; Sociology -- Periodicals; 301.01
• DOI: 10.1177/1463499616652518
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1463-4996

Abstract

This article seeks to rehabilitate the concept of ideology as a necessary tool of struggle against present-day capitalism. Post-structuralist epistemologies, by celebrating pluralism and the emergent character of knowledge and politics, have rendered the intellectual production of a unitary theory an obsolete remnant of a Modernist past. I contend that these well-meaning anti-authoritarian epistemologies unwillingly express the hegemony of a form that the Austrian school proposed for market competition in the first half of the 20th century. Based on ethnographic material of Spain, I acknowledge the need to develop a new conceptual framework that captures the singular experienced realities of the present but links them in a coherent unitary theoretical structure. The productive power of the 'hegemony of form' requires the construction of an ideology that may not only destroy it but also provide the basis of a counter-hegemony for producing a better future.