a project proposal: a history of ideology.

My general field of interest is the historical development of notion and ideal of objectivity, and inseparable from this, the exclusion of certain types of knowledge as subjective, in the meaning with the connotations: false, biased, illusory or simply myth. Within this broad field, I am specifically interested in the role of objectivity in history of socialist theory.

As I understand it, orthodox Marxist cosmology, operates with a dichotomist distinction between the recognition of objective interests and false consciousness (being the result of the workings of bourgeois ideology). In this light, a strategy of emancipation must simply enlighten the unenlightened: tear off the veil of ideology. When this have been done, the proletariat, now realizing there objective interests (the access to objective knowledge is through the dialectic method of scientific socialism), will unquestionable revolt against their suppressers (this also being a historical necessity).This has nevertheless not happened.

Since the days of the dawn of industrialism where Marx did his writings, socialist theory has developed in different directions, and it is the history of the concepts of objectivity and ideology in these traditions and their role in the different strategies of emancipation, I wish to undertake a genealogy of.

Concerning the point of departure of this genealogy I consider to stroke down on Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer and their thesis of the Dialectics of Enlightenment. Here, the ideal of enlightenment is somehow defiled: Enlightenment, in itself containing its opposition (myth) and consequently relapsing into barbarity. I also consider drawing on the works of Antonio Gramsci: who expand the notion of ideology and introduces the concept of struggle for hegemony.

Concerning the late history of objectivity and ideology, I propose working with socialist theories, which in accordance with the linguistic turn; have completely abandoned the idea of an objective world outside of the discourses / outside the ideology (Laclau & Mouffe, Žižek, Vattimo, Hard & Negri). This development introduces a series of intellectual problems I find especially interesting: How are we to understand the concepts of enlightenment and emancipation, if the ideology is at the same time the structures of suppression and that which enables humans to understand and navigate in life? What is the role and status of ideology critique and how are we to evaluate changes in the light of the lack of objectivity?
Different Authors have suggested different answers and it is a discussion of these, as well as their different understandings of the problem in question, I wish to investigate.