Ideology

Definition

Ideology in this wiki's critical-theory register names the ways systems of ideas, images, and practices work to reproduce social reality. Drawing on Wallenstein's account, it moves from Marx's camera obscura (ideology as inverted representation) through Althusser's theory of ideology as a "material, bodily encoded practice" that constitutes the subject by interpellation, to a Foucauldian account of ideology as spatial diagram of power. Crucially for architecture, ideology is understood as "architecture is power in action, never just a symbol of power" — it operates materially through spatial signifying practices rather than merely false images.

Key Thinkers

• Sven-Olov Wallenstein — synthesizes Marx, Althusser, Foucault, Adorno for architecture.
• Manfredo Tafuri — the "critique of architectural ideology" that the concept extends.
• Sotirios Bahtsetzis — the image-economy as a Foucaultian power-knowledge regime and the "semiopower" of signs.
• Mark Fisher — capitalist realism and "ideology without belief" (business ontology).
• Hal Foster — pluralism as ideology; the "becoming-spectacle" of art.
• Karl Marx — the camera obscura; ideology as inverted representation; the commodity as "its own ideology."
• (Related: Michel Foucault, Theodor Adorno. Not yet paged: Althusser — see log.)

Related Concepts

• Critical Architecture — the critical practice that ideology critique enables.
• Noopolitics — the affective/subject-forming dimension of contemporary power.
• Flat Ontology — a critique of the hierarchical ideology of high/low.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Architecture, Critique, Ideology
• The 'Bread & Butter' of Architecture
• Semiocapitalism, Spectacle, Eikonomia, and the Function of Art
• Capitalist Realism (Fisher)
• Recodings (Foster)
• The Architecture of the City (in the Age of its Financial Reproducibility)
• Modernity's Opiate, or the Crisis of Iconic Architecture
• What is Iconic Architecture?
• Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures
• Foucault and Neoliberal Society: The Worker as 'Entrepreneur of Self'
• Flows of Capitalism, Flows of Architecture
• Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics
• The Urban Process under Capitalism: A Framework for Analysis
• The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism
• Architecture and Modernity: A Critique
• Toward a Psychology of Everyday Living
• Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
• Architecture and the Critique of Ideology (Jameson 1985)
• Philosophy for Everyday Life
• Architecture and Crisis: Re-inventing the Icon, Re-imag(in)ing London and Re-branding the City
• Autistic Architecture: The Fall of the Icon and the Rise of the Serial Object of Architecture
• Sociology of Everyday Life
• The Meta-Project, Eisenman, and Capital: Lessons for Critical Architectural Practice
• Iconic Ordure: Review of Sklair's The Icon Project
• Critique of Everyday Life
• Architecture's Image Problem: Have We Ever Been Postmodern?
• Why the Customer Is Always Right: Debord's Spectacle as the Rationalisation of Mimesis
• Commodification and Spectacle in Architecture: A Harvard Design Magazine Reader
• Architecture or Techno-Utopia
• Iconic Architecture and the Culture-ideology of Consumerism
• Towards an Understanding of Architectural Iconicity in Global Perspective
• The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How Contemporary Architecture Became an Instrument of Control and Compliance
• What is 'Everyday Life'? An Exploration of its Political Connections
• Consumerism and Identity: Some Psychoanalytic Considerations
• Architecture and Utopia (Tafuri 1976) — the canonical "critique of architectural ideology": the end of utopia and the crisis of architecture's ideological function.
• The Sphere and the Labyrinth (Tafuri 1987) — ideology as it operates in "bunches" (fasci) across the avant-garde; the "ideology of permanent innovation" as a "theory of the sign"; the avant-garde's nonpolitical, amoral essence revealed in the U.S.S.R.-Berlin encounter.
• Bourdieu and Marx: Practices of Critique (Paolucci ed. 2022) — Fowler on Marx's "demystification" deployed via "magical language"; Bidet on the "epistemological break" from ideology critique to culture critique; the commodity as ideology.
• Troubles in Theory Part VI: From Utopia to Heterotopia (Vidler 2008) — the "space-as-power" thesis absorbed into political critique on both left and right; Lefebvre's charge that Foucault never explains "what space" he refers to.

Open Questions

• Can ideology critique survive the shift from Althusserian interpellation to Deleuzian/Foucauldian accounts of power that Wallenstein gestures toward, without losing its normative critical edge?