This paper argues that political theory should adopt a materialist conception of ideology to critique the racist, misogynist and transphobic narratives that circulate within today’s popular discourse. I draw on the insights of Stuart Hall to develop an account of ideology critique that moves past a limited focus on identifying “mistaken” beliefs. As Hall notes, “The problem of ideology is to give an account, within a materialist theory, of how social ideas arise” (Hall [1983] 2021a: 136). This was the sort of work that Hall took up in the 1970s to understand and critique how the U.K. news media was producing a racist consensus around crime, immigration, and postcolonial Others among the (white) British public. In doing so, Hall moved away from treating ideology as a mere matter of “ruling-class interests” and toward analyzing it as a field of struggle, contestation, and multivocality. There are three aspects of Hall’s analyses, in particular, that political theorists might learn from when it comes to reckoning with racialized, patriarchal, and transphobic discourses today: (1) the importance of conceptualizing the economic and technological conditions under which the mass media build shared audiences; (2) the role that a pre-existing social “commonsense” plays in making such racialized, sexist, and transphobic narratives “travel” and receive the necessary uptake; and (3) the amplifying effect that authority figures can have when they are showcased as “mouthpieces” of harmful views, thereby legitimating and moving extremist discourses into the mainstream public sphere. In this respect, Hall’s work demonstrates the importance of situating knowledge production, circulation, and consumption back within the structural, institutional, and discursive conditions that make certain narratives intelligible and persuasive while removing others from view. Ultimately, a Hall-inspired approach provides a needed corrective to narrowly epistemic and individualist accounts of ideology, which tend to overemphasize the “falsity” of prejudicial beliefs and to presume that “unmasking” or revealing their epistemic pretensions will effectively dislodge their hold on individuals’ practical consciousness.
