Western Journal of Communication

Vol. 75, No. 4, July–September 2011, pp. 407–420

Introduction: W(h)ither Ideology?

Dana L. Cloud & Joshua Gunn

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which
is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.
—Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (67)

Although Marx and Engels did not use the word ‘‘ideology’’ as often as many of us
assume, they described the relationships among wealth, consciousness, interests, and
history in a way that has influenced Marxist scholars of communication ever since.
The term ‘‘ideology’’ was first advanced by Antoine-Louis-Claude, Comte Destutt
de Tracy in 1797 as the name for the study of the regulation of cooperative society
through ideas (Heywood 6; Kennedy 356; Nobus 134). When Marx and Engels
appropriated the term in their discussion of The German Ideology, it took on a pejor-
ative connotation. In a trajectory including Trotsky, Luckács, Gramsci, the Frankfurt
School, and Althusser, critics of ideology since Marx have accounted for the pro-
duction and circulation of dominant ideas in terms of their class belonging or their
representation of class interests.
From a classical Marxist vantage, Terry Eagleton suggests that the general consen-
sus is that ‘‘the study of ideology is among other things an inquiry into the ways in
which people may come to invest in their own unhappiness’’ (xiii). Such a view, first,
depends on a Marxist understanding of dialectical materialism. A classically Marxist
approach posits a dialectical and mutually conditioning relationship between ideol-
ogy and lived experience, such that reference to experience serves as a resource in
the creation of oppositional consciousness. Second, the ontological basis for
class-consciousness is one’s location at the material intersection of economic
relations and forces. The contextualization of consciousness at this nexus is key to

Dana L. Cloud and Joshua Gunn are Associate Professors of Communication Studies at the University of Texas
at Austin. They thank Paul Johnson and Brian Ott for their advice. Correspondence to: Joshua Gunn, Depart-
ment of Communication Studies, University of Texas at Austin, CMA 7.126, 2504A Whitis Ave., Austin, TX
78712-0115, USA. E-mail: slewfoot@mail.utexas.edu

ISSN 1057-0314 (print)/ISSN 1745-1027 (online) # 2011 Western States Communication Association
DOI: 10.1080/10570314.2011.588897
408 D. L. Cloud and J. Gunn
the project of a traditional, materialist critique. As Engels put it in a letter to Joseph
Bloch:

The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure—
political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established
by the victorious class after successful battle, etc, judicial forms and then even the
reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political,
juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into
systems of dogmas—also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical
struggles, and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. (Engels; see
also Lukács 46–82)

Because lived experience is central to classical Marxist accounts of ideology, such

accounts harbor an implicit theory of representation: Some versions of social reality
are more faithful to the interests of ordinary people and their experiences than others.
The process of ideological influence is not only a matter of simple untruth, however,
since many Marxists regard this process as eminently rhetorical. For example,
Raymond Geuss argues that falsehood is not only a matter empirical misrepresen-
tation, as ideological discourses may exhibit both functional falsehood (referring to
how even plausible ideas can bolster oppressive power) and genetic falsehood (refer-
ring to ideas promulgated by those with ulterior motives or intentional mystification;
69–75). Similarly, analytic Marxist Jon Elster offers a view of ideology that describes
three overlapping forms of ideological production: the interest-based dissemination
of distorted ideas, the failure of the social imagination associated with widespread
support for the capitalist system and U.S. imperialism, and the psychological comfort
of palliative discourses such as religion and patriotism (Elster, Making Sense 459–510;
also see Elster, An Introduction 168–85).
Geuss and Elster’s theories of ideology represent the ways in which classical ideol-
ogy critique is more sophisticated than some scholars tend to assume (e.g., Scholle),
offering nuanced accounts of the epistemological while nevertheless making the
identification of distortion a linchpin of critique. In the theoretical humanities in gen-
eral and in rhetorical studies in particular, however, poststructuralist critiques of
identitarian logic and representation seem to have transmogrified ‘‘ideology’’ and
‘‘ideology critique’’ into intellectually leprous beasts.1 From a critical vantage, the
implicit theory of representation at the core of ideology critique has sounded a
thousand poststructural death-knells because, as Slavoj Žižek helpfully explains, it
appears self-defeating:

Does not the critique of ideology involve a privileged place, some how exempted
from the turmoils [sic] of social life, which enables some subject-agent to perceive
the very hidden mechanism that regulates social visibility and non-visibility? Is not
the claim that we can accede to this place the most obvious case of ideology?
Consequently, with reference to today’s state of epistemological reflection, is not
the notion of ideology self-defeating? (‘‘Spectre’’ 57)

Such a privileged position would seem to require access to an ‘‘outside’’ of sorts, a

position external to discourse to which we have no access.
 Western Journal of Communication 409

In tandem with the critical trends in the wider humanities, rhetoricians did engage
in a robust discussion of ideology critique or criticism in the 1980s and 1990s, and
this largely at the behest of discussions catalyzed by rhetorical theorist and critic
Philip Wander (‘‘Ideological Turn’’; ‘‘The Third Persona’’). In the last decade, how-
ever, the terms ‘‘ideology’’ and ‘‘ideology critique’’ have fallen from explicit discussion,
no doubt as a consequence of the critiques of representation and the self-defeating
problem the privileged critical position appears to entail. We think, however, that
whether they are explicitly discussed or not, the concept of ideology and the gestures
of ideology critique are still with us in various forms and guises, and this forum endea-
vors to locate them. Each of the scholars featured in the pages that follow were asked to
take up the simple question, ‘‘Whither ideology?’’ in respect to the humanities in gen-
eral, or rhetorical studies in particular—or both. Before one engages their responses,
however, it is helpful to sketch the intellectual life of the concept of ideology in rhetori-
cal studies.

A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven: Ideology in Rhetorical Studies in the

1970s and 1980s
Ideology did not come into (speech-side) rhetorical studies as Marxist ideology cri-
tique, but rather as a ‘‘robust common sense-skepticism’’ about the unstated political
investments of the critic (Wander, ‘‘Ideological Turn’’ 1). By most accounts, the
(secret) life of ideology in rhetorical studies began with the spirited debate between
Forbes Hill and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell over Richard Nixon’s 1969 ‘‘Vietnamization’’
speech in The Quarterly Journal of Speech (Campbell, ‘‘Rhetoric’’; Campbell, ‘‘Con-
ventional Wisdom’’; Hill, ‘‘Conventional Wisdom’’). Although in retrospect we know
Nixon’s speech was deceptive, Hill argued that the task of the rhetorical critic was to
bracket moral or political judgment in favor of impassive rhetorical analysis.
Campbell countered by arguing Hill’s approach amounted to ‘‘covert advocacy of
the point of view taken in the rhetorical act—under the guise of objectivity’’ (‘‘Con-
ventional Wisdom’’ 453). To wit: Campbell suggested that one cannot not be political
in critical scholarship, and to claim that one’s political commitments can somehow
be bracketed in the critical act is itself, however unwittingly, a political act. In the
sense of unmasking deception, then, we could say that Campbell advanced a critique
of ideology.
Since this widely read skirmish, rhetorical scholars openly wrestled with the prob-
lem of the critic’s political responsibilities and ideological commitments through the
1970s and 1980s. Notable among these discussions was the work of Michael Calvin
McGee, who was the first to advance a rhetorical version of ideology critique with
his conception of the ‘‘ideograph’’ (‘‘The ‘Ideograph’ ’’). McGee was also the first
to articulate what he called a ‘‘materialist’s conception of rhetoric’’ (‘‘Materialist’s’’).
Adopting a Marxist lexicon, McGee’s essay made a signal move in the field by posit-
ing the rhetorical artifact itself as material, rather than tethering the text to and
explaining it in terms of economic social relations. ‘‘Discourse,’’ he wrote, will have
to be characterized as material rather than merely representation of mental and
410 D. L. Cloud and J. Gunn
empirical phenomena’’ (‘‘Materialist’s’’ 25). In McGee’s view, what made his
approach materialist was the idea of ‘‘the text’’ as persistent and residual, coupled
with the contextualization of the rhetorical artifact as part of the broader construc-
tion of social relations (‘‘Materialist’s’’ 37). His prescription to study rhetorical pro-
cesses as constitutive rather than simply reflective or expressive of history helped to
introduce materialism in name to rhetorical studies, but arguably in a form removed
from its classical, Marxist origins (see Cloud, ‘‘Materiality’’).
It was just a year later that Philip Wander outed these varied discussions (includ-
ing McGee’s seemingly stand-alone essays) as an ‘‘ideological turn’’ in 1983. With
recourse to the theories of Herbert August Wichelns, Kenneth Burke, and Martin
Heidegger, Wander framed the turn as an imperative for critical reflexivity. Although
Wander notes Marx and the representatives of the Frankfurt School in passing, he
argues, ‘‘In an academic context, an ideological critique would bore in, at some point,
on the connection between what scholars in a given field call ‘knowledge’ and pro-
fessional interest’’ (‘‘Ideological’’ 2). Expressly shunning the abstractions of high
theory, Wander points to the lived experience of ‘‘war, famine, accidental destruction
by our own technology, [and the] ruin of our own environment’’ as the exigencies
external to critical practice that should ground ideology criticism. ‘‘Criticism takes
an ideological turn,’’ concludes Wander, ‘‘when it recognizes the existence of power-
ful vested interests befitting from and consistently urging policies and technology
that threaten life on this planet, when it realizes that we search for alternatives’’
(‘‘Ideological’’ 18).
Of course, Wander’s view is quite different from the ideology critique of classical
Marxism, critical theory, or their varied iterations across the humanities during the
1980s (see Anderson, Callinicos). For example, Wander’s concern was ‘‘to situate
‘good’ and right’ in a historical context’’ in the effort to ‘‘create a better world’’
(‘‘Ideological’’ 18), whereas ideology critique proper concerned the discernment of
how ideology replicates the status quo unconsciously as a workaday logic, originally
in the form of distortions but gradually as an orchestrated calculation (Horkheimer
and Adorno 94–136). In short, when accounting for the life of ideology in communi-
cation studies, it is important to underscore the distinct way it was frequently
articulated to rhetoric as, simply, politics.
Wander extended his version of ideology criticism as political reflexivity in a
follow-up essay in 1984, which doubled as a response to the first essay’s critics.
Dismissing Lawrence Rosenfield’s insistence that critics must transcend ideology
and politics as hubris (‘‘Ideological Miasma’’), characterizing Forbes Hill’s charge that
critics should remain impartial as willfully ignorant (‘‘A Turn Against’’), and casting
off Allan Megill’s charge that he distorts Heidegger’s thought as irrelevant and ignorant
of rhetorical theory (‘‘Heidegger, Wander’’), Wander advanced his understanding of
ideology with a cognate concept that he terms the ‘‘third persona,’’ which refers to
the audience ‘‘negated through the text’’ (‘‘Third Persona’’ 214; see also McGee,
‘‘Another Phillipic’’).2 Wander built his view of ideology criticism on a widely read,
1970 essay by Edwin Black calling for the moral judgment of rhetorical acts (‘‘Second
Persona’’). Black had argued that by attending to the implied audience or ‘‘second
 Western Journal of Communication 411

persona’’ of a rhetorical address, the critic may discern better the ‘‘ideology’’ of the
rhetor and thereby make a ‘‘moral evaluation’’ (109). Wander extends Black’s
approach by suggesting ideological movement can also be tracked by attending to
the audiences excluded by a given rhetorical address, something that can only be
accomplished through a muscular contextualization and an acute awareness of a given
rhetor’s political climate.
Ten years after Wander urged the ideological turn in rhetorical criticism, he was
invited to edit a special issue on this subject for this journal. Like the debates over
ideology criticism, the arguments of this forum’s contributions were not made in
explicitly Marxist terms. As laid out by Wander in his introduction, the forum’s point
of entry was largely in terms of political engagement in a professionalized field that
discourages and fails to reward the production of work of critical importance. John
Rodden’s eloquent essay, ‘‘Field of Dreams,’’ lamented institutional concern with
prestige and anxiety over status as a ‘‘dream killer’’; the cost is the human work of
empowerment and soulcrafting. Mike Allen debunked the myth of detached inquiry,
and argued that critical theory ‘‘places the scientist, as human being, with a set of
historical, political, and moral forces’’ (202). Enrique Rigsby calls attention to the pau-
city of representation of Black voices in our field. And James West advocated the
humanizing methods of ethnography as a mode of inquiry attentive to power relations
and the struggle over representation. In addition to the call for engaged scholarship,
the forum forefronted the debate among rhetorical scholars over the relationship
between text(s) and context(s). Richard Morris and Thomas Farrell both challenged
the textualizing and aestheticizing of politics in ‘‘the cult of textuality,’’ which, Farrell
argued, ‘‘has had the effect of blinding many of us to and also insulating many of us
from the places where real material grievances are stored and sometimes lost’’ (149).
Then, the special issue gave voice to skeptics of the ideological turn. In different
modes, Janice Hocker Rushing and Celeste Condit offered alternatives to Leftist cri-
tique, Rushing in a warning against legitimating ‘‘Power’’ with our attention, and
Condit advocating an empathic mode of criticism placing the scholar as negotiator
of common ground. Uniquely among the contributions to the forum, A. Susan Owen
and Peter Ehrenhaus criticized modernist modes of critical engagement. In an early
introduction of Deleuze into our field’s journals, they advocated a critical focus on
the ‘‘discursive feeding practices of empire’’ and posited pornography as a metonym
for the exploitative distortion of self and other in American empire.
The 1993 ideology special issue of Western strangely dislocated the topos of ideol-
ogy critique to intervene in a different disciplinary skirmish altogether, that between
those who advocated ‘‘close textual criticism’’ and those who urged a more extrinsic
focus—in respect to history, to theory, to the immediate political milieu, and so on.
Crudely put, the logic here is that those who urge a rhetorical criticism of ideology
(or politics) are more interested in ‘‘context,’’ while those who argue for an appreci-
ation of textual aesthetics, argumentative technique, and so forth are concerned with
‘‘texts.’’ The ground clearing for this skirmish was the First Biennial Pubic Address
Conference held at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1988. Space limitations
prevent our detailing the discussions concerning ‘‘text’’ and ‘‘context’’ and their
412 D. L. Cloud and J. Gunn
relevance to ideology, and we point readers to Michael C. Leff and Fred J. Kauffeld’s
edited conference proceedings for more. What is necessary to mention here is that
McGee and Raymie McKerrow’s sophisticated responses to the ‘‘text=context’’
controversy served as the backdrop for the 1993 conversation on ideology.
Since 1990, McGee had been arguing for a symbolic materialism and for critical
attention to ‘‘rhetorical fragments’’ in a postmodern cultural and political landscape
(e.g., McGee, ‘‘Text’’). His primary response to the late 1980s controversy over text
and context was to refuse the distinction. Likewise, Raymie McKerrow’s 1989 essay
‘‘Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis’’ moved toward understanding discourse in
a ‘‘relativized’’ world. In this article, McKerrow argued for the embrace of Foucault’s
theories of discourse and power in our critical practice. He broke the critical aim in
twain: A critical rhetoric entails both a critique of domination and a critique of free-
dom. His summary of the critique of domination resonates with the tradition of
Marxist ideology critique (based on the ideas of structuralist Göran Therborn), the
goals of which are to chart and demystify appeals that sustain the power of hegem-
onic groups. The critique of freedom, on the other hand, leaves behind the project of
demystification. McKerrow’s description of the Foucaultian critique of freedom is
familiar to us now as the description of discourse as an anonymous production of
positivities and pleasures that form regimes of governance to which there is no ‘‘out-
side.’’ In this sense, for McKerrow discourse is material, and critical praxis must
attend to its effects without resort to a position of epistemological privilege. In this
way, ideology critique was finally discussed as such, in Marxist terms, and the
self-defeating problem of privilege was made explicit. McKerrow sought to remedy
the troubles of transcendence with a tempering immanence, in keeping with the grad-
ual eclipse of ideology with ‘‘discourse’’ in the larger theoretical humanities. The
problem with this move, however, is the difficulty in reconciling a poststructuralist
account of knowledge with the dialectical hermeneutics of Marxist critique.

From Nixon to Foucault: Ideology Assumed or Ideology Abandoned?

In sum, the concept of ideology was present in rhetorical studies in the 1970s and
1980s, but has been deployed often in ways that were synonymous with the political
(traditionally conceived) or used as a topos to navigate cognate controversies.
Wander’s framing of the disciplinary debates articulated ideology critique to consid-
erations of the critic’s assumptions and beliefs, instead of the more traditional and
commonplace focus on the ways in which the beliefs, attitudes, and values of the
dominant class become the beliefs, attitudes, and values for all. Although internally
contradictory, McKerrow’s groundbreaking essay on ‘‘critical rhetoric’’ crystallized
what was soon recognized as incommensurable critical paradigms: Marxist ideology
critique and Foucauldian discourse analysis. Thus the stage was set for an immanent
turn in rhetorical studies that eventually foreswore the transcendent or dialectical
logic of classical ideology critique.
Aside from the critical work of a few Marxist scholars for whom ideology in the
classical sense remains a crucial category (e.g., Aune; Cloud, ‘‘Materiality’’; Cloud,
 Western Journal of Communication 413

‘‘Matrix’’; Cloud, ‘‘Socialism’’), in some sense the aims of ideology critique are
embedded in critical research on race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and social move-
ments. Furthermore, the engagement of rhetorical studies with cultural studies
afforded critics the language of the Gramscian critique of hegemonic discourses
regarding race in particular (Hall, ‘‘Gramsci’s’’). It is important to note how
Althusserian structuralism constituted a de rigueur approach to ideology across the
humanities in a way that supplanted the dialectical materialism of earlier Marxists
and eased the transition between classical Marxism and poststructuralism (see Hall,
‘‘Signification’’). So there is a sense in which the speedy ascent of Foucault’s concep-
tion of ‘‘discourse’’ in the theoretical humanities offered rhetoricians an alternative to
ideology critique that avoided the problem of epistemological privilege; in here—in
discourse—there is, as Sartre lamented in a divergent context, no exit.
Foucault’s work exhibited continuities with Althusser’s posthumanism; however,
his thought was more attractive to rhetorical theorists seeking to avoid determinism
(see Gunn and Treat). As Fabio Vighi and Heiko Feldner detail, Foucault’s program
of discourse analysis (in both his archeological and genealogical projects) avoided the
reductionist conceptions of power and truth; eschewed the ‘‘universalist, synchronist,
and ahistorical’’ conceptions of ideology en vogue in the 1960s and 1970s; skirted the
looming determinism of a structuralist ‘‘base-superstructure model’’; and conceived
of discourse in such a way that it enabled a reflection on gender and race, beyond the
Marxist emphasis on class (144–45).
The appeal of Foucault’s immanentism was recognized and trumpeted early in the
1980s by Carole Blair, who was among the first rhetorical scholars—along with Foss,
Foss, and Trapp and McGee—to introduce Foucault’s insights (Blair; McGee, ‘‘Mate-
rialist’s’’; Foss, Foss, and Trapp; see also Blair and Cooper). Blair argued that Fou-
cault’s thinking might help rhetorical studies emerge from a presumably unhealthy
obsession with the logics representation and the domain of the ‘‘interior’’ (378–79).
After the emergence of ‘‘critical rhetoric’’ in the early 1990s as yet another turn, the
seemingly counter-intuitive embrace of Foucault as a rhetorical theorist was complete.
Barbara Biesecker warned, however, that a Foucauldian approach to rhetorical stu-
dies should not be hitched to the ‘‘profoundly utopian yearning’’ so typical of the
field, nor to the emancipatory aspirations of critical work since the ideological turn.
‘‘For Foucault,’’ writes Biesecker, ‘‘power is something more—or less grandiose—
than a dominant ideology . . . . Indeed when he asserts that ‘relations of power are
not in superstructural positions’ but rather ‘have a directly productive role, wherever
they come into play’ ’’ (355). What Biesecker was pointing to is the non- or
anti-representational logic that grounds Foucault’s approach, and in particular, the
way in which this logic obviates ideology critique: There is no ‘‘truer’’ representation
of the interests of a given group of people, for example, since every assertion is
located at the intersection of host of overlapping or networked discourses that make
the assertion possible (and meaningful) in the first place. Such an approach radically
alters the character of rhetorical inquiry towards, for example, mapping grids of intel-
ligibility and possibility and discerning the intricacies of micro-power (or perhaps
even a rethinking of style; Biesecker 362).
414 D. L. Cloud and J. Gunn
More recently, Ronald Walter Greene has become an influential detractor of ideol-
ogy critique in rhetorical studies. Framing the Marxist legacy in terms of ‘‘material-
ism’’ instead of ideology, Greene argues that the most conspicuous materialist
approaches in rhetorical studies wrongly privilege the ‘‘politics of representation’’
and rely on a ‘‘bi-polar model of power’’ in which the ‘‘rhetorical process hides, dis-
torts, and=or sublimates the coercive relationship between speaker and audience . . . ’’
(‘‘Another’’ 24). Seeing McGee’s widely read ‘‘fragmentation thesis’’ as an opport-
unity to abandon ‘‘a ‘logic of influence’ for a ‘logic of articulation,’ ’’ Greene argues
for a materialist theory of rhetoric inspired by Foucault’s later work on ‘‘govermen-
tality’’ (see Gordon, ‘‘Governmental’’). ‘‘From this perspective,’’ writes Greene,
rhetorical practices function as a technology of deliberation by distributing dis-
courses, institutions, and populations into a field of action. In so doing, rhetorical
allows for a governing apparatus to make judgments about what it should govern,
how it should govern, as well as offering mechanisms for evaluating the success or
failure of governing. (Greene, ‘‘Another’’ 22; see also Greene, ‘‘Rhetoric and
Capitalism’’; Cloud, Macek, and Aune)
Since Greene’s intervention, there has been a distinct shift in rhetorical theory, not
always toward Foucault’s corpus, but certainly in the direction of work that proceeds
from a perspective of immanence, ‘‘the notion of a positive cause which is immanent
within the field of its effects’’ (Feldner 156). After the up-take of Foucault, the think-
ing of Gilles Deleuze (and Felix Guattari) followed, and then came the widely read
and influential Empire, and to a lesser extent Multitude, by Michael Hardt and Anto-
nio Negri. Common to work inspired by these and related immanentist perspectives
are critiques of the logics of representation and dialectical thinking. The concept of
‘‘ideology’’ among them, it would seem, is either outmoded or redundant (see
Laclau, ‘‘Can Immanence’’).

Not Dead Yet! Žižek and the Zombie of Ideology Critique

I hope you make sure we’re properly dead before you start, old rip beak!
—Skinny Puppy, ‘‘Testure’’3

Foucault’s influence on and importance to rhetorical studies cannot be understated,

nor can the value of the immanent turn. Scholars working from the vantage of
immanence have decentered the humanist subject of rhetorical theory, helped to his-
toricize discourses, practices, and institutions, and shown how every utterance is an
articulation of multiple discourses converging in a singular moment or event. The
immanent turn in rhetorical studies helped scholars to think ‘‘beyond the reactive
logic of ideology’’ traditionally conceived, trapped as it was in the assumption
that ‘‘power is located, repressing, and negative,’’ and consequently dichotomous
(Colebrook 543). ‘‘If subjects are effected through power, rather than being subjected
to power, then opposition need not be conceived outside of power,’’ suggests Claire
Colebrook. The critical act need not assume victimage or essentialism.
 Western Journal of Communication 415

The theoretical benefits of immanentist thinking, however, also entail a certain

cost—especially if one abandons any appeal to an ‘‘outside.’’ As Heiko Feldner
has pointed out, a commitment to absolute immanence works toward the
suspension of ‘‘ontological questions,’’ which leads to a number of ‘‘problematic
implications’’:
The most important one is that we are left clueless as to how to get out of this her-
metic universe of self-enclosed discourses, powers and counter-powers, which Fou-
cault himself has depicted so compellingly . . . . [I]n the Foucauldian universe there
are no cracks, no extra discursive loopholes. All we can do, if we do not want to fall
prey to the lures of ideology critique as privileged-viewpoint theory, is to describe
the workings of discourse and power-knowledge, and feel encouraged by the fact
that what we are facing is merely a historically contingent setting which might have
been, and thus could be, utterly different. (153)

Because one is unable to locate something external to the apparatus or regime of

power under examination, we encounter a potential pragmatic problem: absent some
sort of rhetoric of liberation, emancipation, or a universal, how does one make an
appeal to change? Does a progressive politics (in scholarship or in the streets) require
an ‘‘outside’’ rhetorically or strategically in a manner akin, for example, to Spivak’s
conception of ‘‘strategic essentialism?’’ One might answer, for example, that appeals
to change might be reconfigured toward a strategic rhetoric of possibility and new
reconfigurations of power. Or, one might argue that political ends are best and
most expeditiously served with an appeal to the irreducible materiality of bodies in
pain (as does Wander).
We recognize, of course, that the tensions between rhetorical or political strategy
and the immanentist approaches we highlight here are not new. As Judith Butler
maintained over twenty years ago, ‘‘The political task [of immanent critique] is
not to refuse representational politics—as if we could. The juridical structures of
language and politics constitute the contemporary field of power; hence, there is
no position outside this field, but only a critical genealogy of its own legitimating
practices’’ (Gender 8). Even so, does the recognition of our embeddedness in the
‘‘historical present’’ obviate an appeal to an outside or externality or real? Even Butler
has taken up the consideration of a necessary, impossible universality at the core of
the emancipatory politics of the Left (Butler, Laclau, and Žižek 136–81).
Aside from the pragmatic problems immanentism appears to entail, locating the
present place and timeliness of ‘‘ideology’’ in rhetorical (and communication) theory
remains. It is at this juncture that we work toward a conclusion with reference to the
work of Slavoj Žižek, who has argued for the continued significance of the category of
ideology for critical work. As is the case with many of the contributors to this special
forum, professors Cloud and Gunn have a number of theoretical disagreements—one
of us identifies as a poststructuralist with an interest in psychoanalysis, and the other
as a classical Marxist with an investment in emancipatory politics. We note that it
was our reading of Žižek’s work that enabled us to have fruitful discussions and
collaborations, and this is precisely because Žižek’s conception of ideology is
idiosyncratic, refusing to adhere to an academic party line.
416 D. L. Cloud and J. Gunn
Like those who take to immanence, Žižek criticizes traditional ideology critique
for its epistemology of privilege and derides the notion of ideology as some sort of
distortion of a ‘‘truer’’ reality:
. . . the concept of ideology must be disengaged from the ‘representationalist’
problematic: ideology has nothing to do with ‘illusion,’ with a mistaken, distorted
representation of its social content. To put it succinctly: a political standpoint
can be quite accurate (‘true’) as to its objective content, yet thoroughly ideological;
and, vice versa, the idea that a political standpoint gives of its social content
can prove totally wrong, yet there is absolutely nothing ‘ideological’ about it.
(‘‘Spectre’’ 60)

This is to say, the opposition between ideology and reality is a mistake—indeed, for
Žižek, the mistake is hallmark of ideology as such. And, it is because of this mistake
that Žižek critiques immanentist approaches:
When we denounce as ideological the very attempt to draw a clear line of demar-
cation between ideology and actual reality, this inevitably seems to impose the con-
clusion that the only non-ideological position is to renounce the very notion of
extra-ideological reality and accept that all we are dealing with are symbolic fic-
tions, the plurality of universes, never ‘reality’—such a quick, slick ‘postmodern’
solution, however, is ideology par excellence. It all hinges on our persisting in this
impossible position: although no clear line of demarcation separates ideology from
reality, although ideology is already at work in everything we experience as ‘reality,’
we must none the less maintain the tension that keeps the critique of ideology alive.
(‘‘Spectre’’ 70)

Maintaining this critical tension for Žižek requires something exterior, something
outside that eludes ideological closure (also see Butler, Laclau, and Žižek 308–29).
This is because, as Vighi and Feldner put it, ‘‘The negation of externality tout court
is . . . defective, for it thwarts the articulation of radical political projects’’ (148). In
this way, the pragmatic, politico-rhetorical questions posed by the immanent turn
(e.g., do we or don’t we appeal to human essences to change policy?) find a theoreti-
cal homologue. This begs the question: if we must presume something external to the
field of discourse or ideology, and if it is not some brute, material reality as tra-
ditional ideology critique assumes, then what is this necessary something? Žižek’s
answer is exceedingly complex, referencing Lacan’s psychoanalytic registers of the
Symbolic and Real and a homologous, dualistic notion of ideology comprised of a
known and discussed set of ideas and an elusive, non-symbolize-able dimension of
disavowed enjoyment; ideology is first and foremost what we do first and assign
meaning to later (Dean 5; Žižek, ‘‘Spectre’’; Žižek, Sublime).
For the moment we stop short of specifying what we think the exterior is or should
be, how or whether it should be discussed, or if we find Žižek’s description of ideol-
ogy critique as an ‘‘impossible position’’ compelling. Although we do agree about the
necessity of some account of the exterior for retaining ideology critique in any guise,
we nevertheless wish to leave such an assertion open to dispute, and the character of
the exterior open to definition for those who agree. We do so, in part, because as
forum editors we disagree about the character of the Real; we do so, in part, to
 Western Journal of Communication 417

frustrate and provoke; and most importantly, we do so to encourage the reader to

consider all the points of view that follow.
Finally, although we do not wish to suggest that Žižek’s approach to ideology
critique is the theoretical kumbaya for rhetorical and communication scholars, we
do think that the ‘‘both-and-ness’’ of his insights constitute a useful springboard
for discussion. If anything, Žižek’s resuscitation of ideology critique in the theoretical
humanities inspires us to rethink commonly held theoretical assumptions, to rethink
the fidelity of our scholarly commitments, and to start speaking over or discarding a
transcendence=immanence binary in theory that has—to alter a title from some
Talking Heads—stopped making (complete) sense. It is in this spirit, then, that we
pose the question for rhetorical and communication scholars, ‘‘Whither ideology?’’

Notes
[1] We say ‘‘leprous,’’ not because ideology has been explicitly critiqued, but rather because the
concept has simply been avoided or abandoned or left to the colony of ‘‘them Marxists.’’
[2] A fourth response was published by Michael Calvin McGee, who worried that the ‘‘ideologi-
cal turn’’ would be reduced to a ‘‘method,’’ a habit among rhetorical critics in the 1970s and
early 1980s (‘‘Another Philippic’’).
[3] This is a sample used by Skinny Puppy in their song ‘‘Testure.’’ The sample is taken from the
1982 adult animated film, The Plague Dogs, in which two test animals, Snitter and Rowf,
escape a lab and are pursued by humans. The full quote: ‘‘Have you ever thought,
Rowf . . . that we won’t need food when we’re dead? Or names for that matter . . . I wonder
who the buzzards will like best . . . You, or me . . . I hope you make sure we’re properly dead
before you start, old rip-beak!.’’

References
Allen, Mike. ‘‘Critical and Traditional Science: Implications for Communication Research.’’
Western Journal of Communication 57.2 (1993): 100–08. Print.
Althusser, Louis. ‘‘Ideology & Ideological State Apparatuses.’’ Lenin & Philosophy & Other Essays.
1971. New York: Monthly Review Publishers, 2001. 127–86. Print.
Anderson, Perry. In the Tracks of Historical Materialism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Print.
Biesecker, Barbara. ‘‘Michel Foucault and the Question of Rhetoric.’’ Philosophy and Rhetoric 25
(1993): 351–64.
Black, Edwin. ‘‘The Second Persona.’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 56.2 (1970): 109–19. Print.
Blair, Carole. ‘‘The Statement: Foundation of Foucault’s Historical Criticism.’’ Western Journal of
Speech Communication 51.4 (1987): 364–83. Print.
Blair, Carole, and Cooper Martha. ‘‘The Humanist Turn in Foucault’s Rhetoric of Inquiry.’’ Quar-
terly Journal of Speech 73.2 (1987): 151–72. Print.
Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Print.
Butler, Judith, Ernesto, Laclau, and Slavoj, Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contempor-
ary Dialogues on the Left. New York: Verso, 2000. Print.
Callinicos, Alex. Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1989.
Print.
Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs. ‘‘Conventional Wisdom—Traditional Form: Rejoinder to Forbes Hill.’’
Quarterly Journal of Speech 58.4 (1972): 451–54. Print.
418 D. L. Cloud and J. Gunn
———. ‘‘The Rhetoric of Mythical America Revisited.’’ Critiques of Contemporary Rhetoric. Eds.
Karlyn Kohrs Campbell. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1972. 202–12. Print.
Cloud, Dana L. ‘‘The Materiality of Discourse as Oxymoron: A Challenge to Critical Rhetoric.’’
Western Journal of Communication 58.3 (1994): 141–63. Print.
———. ‘‘The Matrix and Critical Theory’s Desertion of the Real.’’ Communication and Critical=
Cultural Studies 3.4 (2006): 329–54. Print.
———. ‘‘ ‘Socialism of the Mind: The New Age of Post-Marxism.’ ’’ After Postmodernism: Recon-
structing Ideology Critique. Eds. Herbert W. Simons and Michael Billig. London: Sage,
1994. 222–54. Print.
Cloud, Dana L., Steve Macek, and James Arnt Aune. ‘‘The ‘Limbo of Ethical Simulacra’: A Reply to
Ron Greene.’’ Philosophy and Rhetoric 39.1 (2006): 72–84. Print.
Colebrook, Claire. ‘‘Certeau and Foucault: Tactics and Strategic Essentialism.’’ The South Atlantic
Quarterly 100 (2001): 543–74.
Condit, Celeste Michelle. ‘‘The Critic as Empath.’’ Western Journal of Communication 57.2 (1993):
178–90. Print.
Dean, Jodi. Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive. Malden, MA: Polity, 2010.
Eagleton, Terry. Ideology: An Introduction. London: Verso, 1991. Print.
Elster, Jon. An Introduction to Karl Marx. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Print.
———. Making Sense of Marx. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Print.
Engels, Friedrich. Letter to J. Bloch. 21 Sept. 1890. Marx-Engels Correspondence 1890. N.p.: n.p.,
n.d. N. pag. Marxists Internet Archive. Web. 25 Jan. 2011. <http://www.marxists.org>.
Farrell, Thomas B. ‘‘On the Disappearance of the Rhetorical Aura.’’ Western Journal of Communi-
cation 57.2 (1993): 147–58. Print.
Feldner, Heiko, ‘‘Žižek Versus Foucault.’’ Did Somebody Say Ideology? On Slavoj Žižek, &
Consequences. Eds. Fabio Vighi and Heiko Feldner. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, 2007. 146–77.
Foss, Sonja K., Karen A. Foss, and Robert, Trapp. Contemporary Perspectives on Rhetoric. Prospect
Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1985.
Geuss, Raymond. The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1981. Print.
Gordon, Colin. ‘‘Governmental Rationality: An Introduction.’’ The Foucault Effect: Studies in
Governmentality. Eds. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1991. 1–51.
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Comp. Geoffrey Nowell Smith. Trans.
Quintin Hoare. New York: International, 1972. Print.
Greene, Ronald Walter. ‘‘Another Materialist Rhetoric.’’ Critical Studies in Mass Communication 15
(1998): 21–41.
———. ‘‘Rhetoric and Capitalism: Rhetorical Agency as Communicative Labor.’’ Philosophy and
Rhetoric 37 (2004): 188–206. Print.
Gunn, Joshua, and Shaun Treat. ‘‘Zombie Trouble: A Propaedeuctic on Ideological Subjectification
and the Unconscious.’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 91 (2005): 144–74.
Hall, Stuart. ‘‘Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race, & Ethnicity.’’ Stuart Hall: Critical Dialo-
gues in Cultural Studies. Eds. Stuart Hall, David Morley, and Kuan-Tsing Chen. London,
New York: Routledge, 1996. 411–40. Print.
———. ‘‘Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-Structuralist Debates.’’
Critical Studies in Mass Communication 2 (1985): 91–115.
Heywood, Andrew. Political Ideologies: An Introduction. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003.
Print.
Hill, Forbes. ‘‘Conventional Wisdom-Traditional Form: The President’s Address of November 3,
1969.’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 58.4 (1972): 373–86. Print.
 Western Journal of Communication 419

———. ‘‘A Turn Against Ideology: Reply to Professor Wander.’’ Central States Speech Journal 34.2
(1983): 121–26. Print.
Hocker Rushing, Janice. ‘‘Power, Other, and Spirit in Cultural Texts.’’ Western Journal of
Communication 57.2 (1993.): 159–68. Print.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments.
Ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2002.
Kennedy, Emmet. ‘‘ ‘Ideology’ from Destutt de Tracy to Marx.’’ Journal of the History of Ideas 40.3
(1979): 353–68. Print.
Laclau, Ernesto. ‘‘Can Immanence Explain Social Struggles?’’ Empire’s New Clothes. Ed. Paul
Passavant and Jodi Dean. New York: Routledge, 2004. 21–30. Print.
Leff, Michael C., and Fred J. Kauffeld, eds. Texts in Context: Critical Dialogues on Significant Epi-
sodes in American Political Rhetoric. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Stanford: MIT Press,
1972. Print.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. ‘‘The German Ideology.’’ Marxists Internet Archive. Creative
Commons, n.d. Web. 25 Jan. 2011. <http://www.marxists.org>.
McGee, Michael Calvin. ‘‘Another Phillipic: Notes on the Ideological Turn in Modern Criticism.’’
Central States Speech Journal 35.1 (1984): 43–50. Print.
———. ‘‘The ‘Ideograph’: A Link Between Rhetoric and Ideology.’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 66.1
(1980): 1–16. Print.
———. ‘‘A Materialist’s Conception of Rhetoric.’’ Explorations in Rhetoric. Eds. Raymie McKerrow.
Glenview, IL: Scott Foresman, 1982. 23–48. Print.
———. ‘‘Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture.’’ Western Journal of
Communication 54 (1990): 274–89.
McKerrow, Raymie E. ‘‘Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis.’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 56.2
(1989): 91–112. Print.
Megill, Allan. ‘‘Heidegger, Wander, and Ideology.’’ Central States Speech Journal 34 (1983): 114–119.
Morris, Richard. ‘‘Modernity’s Prometheus.’’ Western Journal of Communication 57.2 (1993):
139–46. Print.
Nobus, Dany. ‘‘Beware of the Anacoluthon! On Žižek’s Ideology.’’ Did Somebody Say Ideology? On
Slavoj Žižek and Consequences. Eds. Fabio Vighi and Heiko Feldner. Newcastle, UK:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. 134–43.
Owen, Susan A., and Peter Ehrenhaus. ‘‘Empire.’’ Western Journal of Communication 57.2 (1993):
169–77. Print.
Rigsby, Enrique D. ‘‘African American Rhetoric and the ‘Profession.’ ’’ Western Journal of Com-
munication 57.2 (1993): 191–99. Print.
Rodden, John. ‘‘Field of Dreams.’’ Western Journal of Communication 57.2 (1993): 111–38. Print.
Rosenfield, Lawrence. ‘‘Ideological Miasma.’’ Central States Speech Journal 34.2 (1983): 119–21.
Print.
Scholle, David J. ‘‘Critical Studies: From the Theory of Ideology to Power=Knowledge.’’ Critical
Studies in Mass Communication 5 (1988): 16–41.
Therborn, Göran. The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology. London: Verso, 1999. Print.
Trotsky, Leon. Literature and Revolution. Chicago: Haymarket, 2005. Print.
Vighi, Fabio, & Heiko Feldner. ‘‘Ideology Critique or Discourse Analysis? Žižek Against Foucault.’’
European Journal of Political Theory 6 (2007): 141–59.
Wander, Philip C. ‘‘An Ideological Turn in Rhetorical Criticism.’’ Central States Speech Journal 34.1
(1983): 1–18. Print.
———. ‘‘Introduction: Special Issue on Ideology.’’ Western Journal of Communication 57.2 (1993):
105–10. Print.
420 D. L. Cloud and J. Gunn
———, Ed. Special Issue on Ideology. Spec. issue of Western Journal of Communication 57.2 (1993):
N. pag. Print.
———. ‘‘The Third Persona: An Ideological Turn in Rhetorical Theory.’’ Central States Speech
Journal 35 (Winter 1984): 197–216. Print.
West, James T. ‘‘Ethnography and Ideology: The Politics of Cultural Representation.’’ Western
Journal of Communication 57.2 (1993): 209–20. Print.
Žižek, Slavoj. ‘‘The Spectre of Ideology.’’ The Žižek Reader. Ed. Elizabeth Wright & Edmond
Wright. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 199. 53–86.
———. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Routledge, 1989.
Copyright of Western Journal of Communication is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may
not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written
permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.