прагматика и медиа дискурс / Teun A van Dijk - Ideology

Ideology

A Multidisciplinary Approach

Teun A. van Dijk

1

S AGE Publications

London • Thousand Oaks • New Delhi

Teun A. van Dijk 1998

First published 1998

Ah rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the Publishers.

SAGE Publications Ltd

6 Bonhill Street

London EC2A 4PU

SAGE Publications Inc

2455 Teller Road

Thousand Oaks, California 91320

SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd

32, M-Block Market

Greater Kailash — I

New Delhi 110 048

British Library Cataloguing in Publkation data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 0 7619 5654 9

ISBN 0 7619 5655 7 (pbk)

Library of Congress catalog record available

Typeset by Photoprint, Torquay

Printed in Great Britain by The Cromwell Press, Trowbridge, Wiltshire

Preface

Most scholars have a number of dream projects in mind: topics they have always wanted to investigate and write about, but for various reasons never did. I have many such unrealized acadernic dreams. For many years, an innovative study on the relations between ideology and discourse has been one of them.

Ideology has been dealt with in literally thousands of books and articles, but (as many other authors also conclude) its defmition is as elusive and confused as ever. So, to write a book that would specifically deal with the complex relations between ideology and discourse is more than a challenge: it is pure hubris, especially since such a book should of course begin with a proper theory of ideology. How could I possibly contribute anything new and interesting given such an enormous literature?

Not surprisingly, therefore, it soon turned out that the theoretical component of such a study would itself be a major undertaking. One single book would barely be enough to explore the many issues, concepts and disciplines involved in the analysis of ideology, let alone the relations between discourse and ideology.

Nevertheless, I accepted the challenge, and this book is the first instalment of this major enterprise. It discusses some of the fundamental concepts of such a new, multidisciplinary theory of ideology, and sketches the overall outline of the ways ideology is expressed and reproduced by discourse. The overall theoretical framework for my approach to ideology may be summarized by the triangle formed by the concepts Cognition, Society and Discourse. That is, first, the status, internal organization and mental functions of ideologies need to be studied in tercos of social cognition. Second, the conditions and functions of ideologies are obviously not only cognitive but also social, political, cultural and historical. And third, ideologies are formed, changed and reproduced largely through socially situated discourse and communication.

Instead of simply adding results from psychology, the social sciences and discourse studies, however, these three central concepts have to be reformulated and integrated into one theoretical framework. Discourse should be explicitly related to the structures and strategies of the personal and social mind, as well as to those of social situations, social interactions and societal structures. In the sarne way, also cognition should be linked with both discourse and society, thus serving as the necessary interface by which social structure can be explicitly related to discourse structure.

viii Preface

The vast majority of studies of ideology (whether Marxist or non-Marxist) are rooted in the social sciences and pay extensive attention to ideologies in relation to class, dominant groups, social movements, power, the political economy or, more recently, to gender and culture. They have paid less attention to the cognitive and the discursive dimensions of ideologies, however. Indeed, classical work hardly analyses the details of the 'ideas', 'beliefs' or 'consciousness' assumed to constitute an ideology. Even most contemporary approaches ignore the advances in current cognitive science, and, vice versa, most cognitive science is barely interested in questions of the mental structures and functions of ideologies. This is why I pay more attention to this cognitive dimension of the theory, while emphasizing that ideologies may well be located in the mirad but that this does not mean that they are therefore less social.

Though usually of later vintage, extant work on discourse and ideology does of course emphasize the important role of text and talk in the (re)production of ideologies. To my knowledge, however, among the many studies of ideology, some of which also deal with language or discourse, there is not a single one that details how exactly ideology shapes text and talk, and conversely, how it is formed, acquired or changed by discourse and communication.

As part of the more social and political component of the theory, and establishing an explicit link with my previous big project, this book will occasionally use racism and racist ideologies as an illustration of the theoretical argument. This does not mean, however, that I offer a fully fledged account of racist ideologies, which would need to be accounted for in a separate monograph. However, whereas throughout the book my comments on ideology, racism and discourse will be rather general, Chapter 28 offers a concrete case study of a recent text about race relations in the USA, namely, Dinesh D'Souzá s book The End of Racism.

A muldisciplinary theory of ideology can be accomplished only by reducing its complexity. I am not a psychologist, a sociologist or a political scientist. This means that my overall perspective and organizing conceptualizations will often be those of discourse and discourse analysis. There are worse biases, given the fundamental role of discourse in the formation and expression of ideology as social cognition and in the reproduction of ideologies in society. At the same time, it is obvious that this book cannot do, redo or undo the relevant substantial work that has already been done in the social sciences.

As suggested, this book is the first result of a bigger project. It sketches the overall framework of the theory. In later studies I hope to detall each of its main components, namely, those of social cognition, social interaction and societal structures, as well as the structures of discourse involved in the expression and reproduction of ideology. These studies will also feature concrete empirical studies of the relations between discourse, cognition and society, as well as more detailed reviews of the relevant literature.

I may disappoint sorne of the readers whose notion of discourse is exclusively associated with the more literary, philosophical or postmodern notions of 'discourse' or 'text' After more than thirty years, the study of discourse has become a multidisciplinary field, featuring sometimes highly explicit and detailed theories of structures and functions of text and talk. Unfortunately, many fashionable approaches that currently refer to 'text' or 'discourse' ignore these advances, and for that reason offer an unsuitable basis for a theory of ideology.

Even in a theoretical book like this, I highly value accessibility for scholars and students from different disciplines. This mean that esoteric jargon will be avoided, and theoretical terms only introduced and explained where necessary. Many of the notions dealt with in this book have been discussed in sóinetimes rather technical earlier studies. In order to be able to construct an integrated theoretical framework, many details had to be ignored in favour of the overall outline of the theory. I hope to be able to pay attention to these details in the following studies in this series.

There is another way in which this book differs from much other work on ideology: it barely looks back. Many studies, as is customary in philosophy and sociology (and much less in, e.g., psychology and linguistics), are commentaries (on commentaries) on the classics, from the French philo- sophes and Marx/Engels to Lukács, Gramsci, Althusser, Foucault and Habermas. (For detail, see the excellent introductions and historical overviews by Larrain, Eagleton and Billig, among others.)

In this book I want to go beyond such a history and philosophy of ideology, and integrate new ideas of contemporary discourse studies, linguistics, cognitive science, political science and new developments in the other social sciences. In other words, in order not to get entangled in endless debates with the classics, I have left such debates to the many other authors who engage in them. Instead, I present a systematic, analytical study, in which the old debates and current other studies of ideology play a role only in the background, in the footnotes and in the references. This of course does not mean that I think most earlier work on ideology is irrelevant. On the contrary, there are many studie s whose theories, concepts and empirical results are also suitable for my own project. However, in the first, theoretical book of this project, I prefer to focus on the oyeran framework and present that as clearly and analytically as possible, without extensive comments on, discussions with, or references to the vast amount of earlier work. Moreover, in order to keep the already extensive bibliography within normal proportions, most references will be to books and not to articles. In the next volumes I hope to enter more explicitly into a debate with other approaches to ideology.

Since this book will, I hope, be followed by others in this project on discourse and ideology, I welcome the comments of readers. They may help me improve the theory in these next studies.

Acknowledgements

Finally, I am glad to be able to acknowledge the comments on an earlier version of this book by Michael Bil ig, Terry Eagleton, Philomena Essed and Ruth Wodak I am especially grateful for the extensive comments by Martha Augoustinos and Luisa Martín Rojo. Some of them kindly disagreed with the overall perspective, others with details of my discussion. I have tried to argue as clearly as possible where some of these discrepancies are inherent to the choices I have made in this book, and in other cases gladly corrected my errors and filled various gaps. Otherwise the usual formula applies: any remaining errors are of course mine.

Teun A. van Dijk

Introduction

The fuzzy life of 'ideology'

It's almost a routine. Studies of ideology often begin with a remark about the vagueness of the _notion and the resulting theoretical confusion of its analysis, as I did in the Preface. Indeed, of all essentially contested and controversial concepts in the social sciences and the humanities, that of 'ideology' may well come out near the top of the list. One historical and political — and, yes, ideological — reason for this special status may be that 'ideology' is one of these notions that have divided Marxists and nonMarxists, as well as 'critical' scholars and 'uncriticar ones — obviously divisions that are themselves ideological.

Still, as a general concept, ideology is hardly more vague than similar Big Terms in the social sciences and the humanities. In many respects, the same holds for such notions as 'society', 'group', 'action', 'power', 'discourse', 'mind' and 'knowledge', among many others. These notions defy precise definition and seem to happily live the fuzzy life inherent in such catch-all terms that denote complex sets of phenomena and that are the preferred toys of philosophers and scholars in the humanities and the social sciences. Where 'ideology' differs from these other general notions, however, is that its conunonsense usage is generally pejorative.

Definitions generally are hardly adequate to capture all the complexities of such notions. Indeed, such fundamental notions are the objects of inquiry for theories and whole disciplines. Definitions cannot be expected to summarize all the insights accumulated in such bodies of knowledge — even if there were no controversies over the meaning of the central concepts of such disciplines. In sum, as with many similar notions, and apart from its uses in everyday discourse, the various versions of the concept of ideology are simply the scholarly constructs of competing theories. That is, at least with this word, it is as Alice was told in Wonderland: we define what the word means. Of course, presuming that 'we' have the power to do so.

Traditional approaches

Despite the controversies and the many different approaches to the concept of ideology, the historical terms of the debate remain remarkably similar. We are routinely brought back to the eighteenth century, when Destutt de Tracy in France proposed a 'science of ideas' to be called idéologie, a

Introduction

science which, incidentally, never made it, unless we take philosophy (or psychology?) as its current representative. 1 With equal predictability, we will then meet Marx, of course, usually in the company of Engels, and then their followers (neoor not) in our century, among whom Lukács, Gramsci and Althusser play a prominent role. Similarly, on the non-Marxist side, we are bound to encounter a sequence of sociologists and philosophers, of whom Durkheim and Mannheim are merely the most famous. 2

As is customary in sociology and philosophy, these and other classics still appear so prominently in most current discussions of ideology that it is hard to find more analytical and sophisticated studies that integrate new concepts and insights of contemporary approaches in the humanities and the social sciences.

The remnants of the classical debates are also crystallized in the everyday, commonsense uses of the notion of 'ideology', namely, taken as a system of wrong, false, distorted or otherwise misguided beliefs, typically associated with our social or political opponents. Por many in the West — laypersons, politicians and scholars alike — communism was (based on) such an ideology. It was often seen as the prototype of an ideology. 3 The legacy of Marx and Engels, to whom this negative, critical concept of ideology is usually attributed, is thus posthumously discredited by the very notion they introduced themselves.

At the same time, this negative meaning and uses of the everyday concept of ideology shows what most earlier analysts also emphasized, namely, that ideologies express or conceal oné s social or political position, perspective or interests: few of 'us' (in the West or elsewhere) describe our own belief systems or convictions as 'ideologies'. On the contrary, Ours is the Truth, Theirs is the Ideology. Capitalism, the Market, or Christianity, even when 'we' are no fans of them, are 'ours' and therefore not usually described as ideologies in everyday discourse.

We see that as residues of scholarly debates, commonsense conceptions of the notion of 'ideology' capture in a nutshell many of the main tenets of the classical tradition: (a) ideologies are false beliefs; (b) ideologies conceal real social relations and serve to deceive others; (c) ideologies are beliefs others have; and (d) ideologies presuppose the socially or politically self-serving nature of the definition of truth and falsity.

The critical element of the notion of ideology in this tradition is usually associated with various notions of power and dominance. Following Marx! Engels, ideologies were first of all defined as the prevailing ideas of an age.

According to the political economy of these philosophers, these dominant ideas were associated with those of the ruling class. They are part of the 'superstructuré and hence determined by the economic or 'material' base of society. Because the ruling class, however defined, controls the means of production, including the means of the (re)production of ideas — most notably those of politics, the media, literature and education — they are also able to make their ideologies more or less accepted by the ruled as the undisputed knowledge of the 'natural' ways things are.