The article I co-authored with Jennifer Ponce de León, “Toward a Compositional Model of Ideology: Materialism, Aesthetics, and Cultural Revolution,” was just published here in Philosophy Today. If you do not have access and would like to read it, a pdf is available here.

Liu Bolin

Abstract: This article sets forth a compositional model of ideology by drawing on the tradition of historical materialism and further developing its insights into the aesthetic composition of reality. It demonstrates how ideology is not simply a set of false beliefs but is rather the process by which social agents are composed over time in every dimension of their existence, including their thoughts, practices, perceptions, representations, values, affects, desires, and unconscious drives. By working through a number of diverse debates and authors—ranging from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to Louis Althusser, Eduardo Galeano, Rosaura Sánchez, and Paulo Freire—it thereby elucidates how ideology is best understood as an aesthetic process that includes every aspect of sense and sense-making, and that therefore requires a collective, cultural revolution as its antidote.

Key words: ideology, aesthetics, commodity fetishism, materialism, Marxism, ideology critique, conscientização, cultural revolution