At present, processes ofmigration,trans-
nationalismanddiasporaplace identity (or
the project ofidentification) firmly on the the-
oretical agenda. In the midst of such
mobilities – as much a geographical and his-
torical reality as a theoretical benefit – new
spatial metaphors of the ‘out of place’ and
‘in-between’ render identity as a performance
of ambivalences, doublings and dissimula-
tions. Various theories of the post-colonial
(Said, 2003 [1978]; Spivak, 1988; Bhabha,
1990a) have all sought a more complex, non-
binary mode of identity, replacing neat na-
tional and ethnic divisions with the more
fluid terms of ‘translation’, hybridity and
transgression, and using these as critical strat-
egies for destabilizing the power, and polar-
ities, of Western thought. As a counter-
current, however, the resurgence of neo-
nationalisms (Eastern Europe post 1989), the
rise of religious absolutisms (from India, to the
Middle East to the USA) and a renewed rhet-
oric of civilizational differences (the image of a
‘clash of civilizations’) speak directly of an
anxiety at the core of our contemporary selves.
Indeed, if a hardening of identities is one
symptom of the contradictions of the local
and the global inpostmodernity, from an-
other perspective the national frame in which
people have conventionally positioned them-
selves has been eroded by a new social order in
which the homogenizing effects of global mar-
kets has reconfigured identity as a ready-to-
buy, consumer option.
All of this charges identity with questions of
our present and future political and ethical
practice. While recognizing its fictive nature,
the disruption of conventional paradigms of
social experience and analysis (the nation,
ideology, gender, race, class) heralds different
possibilities of identification, placing new em-
phasis on subjective agency in its relational
negotiations and improvisations. At this
point, as Stuart Hall puts it, the question is
not about ‘who we are’ or ‘where we have
come from’ so much as ‘what we might be-
come, how we have been represented and how
that bears on how we might represent our-
selves’ (Hall and du Gay, 1996). jd
Suggested reading
Duncan and Rattansi (1992).
ideology Ideology originally referred to a
‘science of ideas’, proposed by French ration-
alist philosophers at the end of the eighteenth
century. It is now more widely used to refer to
any system of beliefs held for more than purely
epistemic reasons. Some theories of ideology
are neutral when it comes to accounting for
the role of ideas and beliefs in social life.
Others involve normative claims about how
knowledge and belief function epistemologic-
ally to reproduce power-relations. In this sec-
ond set of theories, ideology is understood as a
distorted, inverted, upside down or false view
of reality. In this usage, ideology is therefore
implicitly or explicitly counterposed to some
mode of knowing that sees reality in a true and
accurate way. The most influential source for
this second type of understanding is Marxism.
Despite never having been clearly worked
through in his own work, ideology is arguably
Marx’s most powerful bequest to modern so-
cial theory. In theGerman ideologyof 1845,
Marx and Engels argued against idealist phil-
osophies that saw ideas as the prime movers of
historical change (seeidealism), asserting in-
stead that ‘social being’ determined people’s
‘consciousness’. This is a basic axiom of ma-
terialist analysis (seehistorical material-
ism). They also argued that in class-divided
societies such as those ofcapitalism, the rul-
ing ideas would be those of the ruling class,
since they owned and controlled the means for
producing and circulating the knowledge,
beliefs and values through which people
made sense of their own experiences. In
Marx’s early work, this ideological determin-
ation of people’s consciousness is theorized in
terms of the alienation of the working class,
who come to see social relations in inverted
form. The argument was subsequently later
reformulated ascommodity fetishism. In 1867,
Marx argued inCapitalthat under generalized
capitalist commodity production, the social
dimensions of human labour and interaction
take on the appearance of free-standing obj-
ects, and commodities take on apparently
magical qualities independent from the labour
processes that produce them. Commodity
fetishism is a theory of how people come to
misrecognize reality through the medium of
distorted appearances. This kernel of a mature
theory of ideology was further refined in 1923
by Gyo ̈rgy Luka ́cs, inHistory and class con-
sciousness, with the concept of reification,
whereby people appear to each other as things
rather than as active agents of historical pro-
cesses, which he held to be a form offalse
consciousness.
The epistemological understanding of ideol-
ogy as a generalized system of misrecognition
in the interests of capitalist reproduction was
systematized into models of base and super-
structure, in which economic processes areGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_I Final Proof page 366 31.3.2009 7:05pmIDEOLOGY