прагматика и медиа дискурс / Teun A van Dijk - Ideology

represented in mental models. These models are strategically adapted to the situation at hand, and this means that sometimes the expression of an ideologically'correá opinion may be less appropriate for reasons of politeness, positive self-presentation and commonsense interests — racist shopkeepers would soon be broke if they were to openly derogate their black customers, for instance.

Moreover, sine social members are members of several groups, they'll bring to bear several ideologies in their models of everyday events, so that the models may become seemingly incoherent. The same is true for their practices and discourses. People may adhere both to more or less humanitarian and democratic principies, but at the same time not apply them to certain social relations: for example, those of gender, age or ethnicity. The use of various ideologies in one situation (and in laboratory experiments the same is true for simulated situations) thus results in sometimes complex models which exhibit apparently incoherent opinions in discourse, typically expressed in disclaimers such as 'I am not a racist, but .. 'I am ah for equality of women, but.. .'. Personal experiences and biographies, local circumstances and interpersonal relations will further contribute to the complexity of such models and the discourses based on them. Indeed, many of these observations have already been made, in other terms, in classical studies on cognitive dissonance, 4 which we are now able to reformulate in terms of model structures and relations between models and social representations. Hence, as suggested before, conclusions about the contents and structures of ideologies need to be based on comparisons of many events in which variable properties of discourse are explained in tercos of such constraints.

In other words, variability of ideological expression is explained by the complex interplay of several ideologies and their contextually specific uses, whereas the continuity of ideological opinions can be explained in terms of socially shared ideologies that are rather stable and context-free. No need therefore to assume that ideologies are sets of mutually incoherent propositions. If such were the case, people would in principie always express themselves incoherently, also across situations, and there is no evidence for that. On the contrary, we know from work on racism (and sexism, etc.) that talk on ethnic (or gender) relations rather consistently has recourse, in variable contexts, to similar basic norms, values, principies, ideological propositions and more specific attitudes. Unless personal and social circumstances change dramatically, or when being targeted by persuasive discourse, someone advocating liberal immigration rules today, will not be for strict ones tomorrow. 5

That is, the 'normal' situation is that of individual variability, and the situation that especially needs to be explained is precisely the fact that many different people in many different situations still appear to use very similar ideological opinions. It is ideological conformity and consensus that are remarkable, and much less that different people with different experiences have differences of opinion. On the other hand, if such conformity is mainly

explained in terms of the identical social or economic situation of a group, then individual variation and dissent are the phenomena that need to be explained.

Change

Of course, ideologies may change, but this takes time, in particular because they are socially shared, and groups need much time to change their basic ideologies because such changes need much public discourse and debate. And precisely during such periods of ideological formation and change, other (opposed) ideologies may become more relevant in the control of action and discourse, and more personal variation will be the result. For instance, after the demise of state socialism and communism around 1990, which also affected the Left in general, leftist ideologies entered a state of transition as well, whereas neo-liberal market ideologies have become not only more dominant but virtually hegemonic. As a result, even in more or less progressive media, socialist discourse has become 'unfashionablé . I shall come back to these social and political conditions of changing ideologies laten'

Conclusion

From these arguments it may be concluded that ideologies 'ideally' reflect the goals and the interests of the group, and do so optimally when these interests are coherently translated into a set of basic beliefs shared within the group. Such coherence facilitates the organization of new attitudes about specific issues and the co-ordination of social practices by different members in different situations. That is, coherence is a condition of continuity and reproduction. As a theoretical hypothesis it explains members' experiences, observations and expressions of such continuity.

Variations and contradictions in the enactment or expression of such ideologies are perfectly compatible with this hypothesis if we assume that such manifestations are explained by multiple ideological allegiances of social actors, both at the level of attitudes, as well as at the level of specific, contextual and personal, models of events, which in tum monitor discourse and other social practices. As is generally the case for social representations, including knowledge (including knowledge of the language or about interaction), social members are experts in adapting these shared representations to their personal needs and contextual constraints.

It is also at this level that systematic variation and 'deviatioñ may give rise to attitudinal and fmally to ideological change, as soon as enough members, and especially leaders who control public discourse, are able to persuasively communicate such alternative systems of judgement to other group members. Changes in feminist and socialist ideologies are well-known examples of such transformations. In this way, ideologies, despite their

relatively stable nature, may with some delay flexibly change as a consequence of (a) changing social interests and (b) the everyday experiences of group members, and of course (c) persuasive ideological discourse. These and other conditions for ideological continuity and change will be discussed in later chapters.

Consciousness

Introduction

When dealing with the cognitive dimension of ideologies, anothér issue needs to be addressed, namely, that of consciousness. In the first ,place, this notion has been part of the history of the study of ideologies since Marx and Engels, mostly in the form of 'false consciousness'. Second, we may ask whether social group members have, experience or use their ideologies more or less consciously, or whether these belief systems are acquired, used and changed more or less 'unconsciously' or, in other tercos,

False consciousness

The traditional notion of 'consciousness' (German: Bewufitsein) plays a central role in the traditional accounts of ideologies, especially in combination with its negative modifier 'false . 1 This phrase then usually refers to group ideologies that do not reflect the 'objective' socio-economic interests of a group. Thus, workers or poor people may develop an ideology that is rather in the interests of, respectively, the ruling class, the elites, the company they work for, or the owners or the managers of that company.

Such a 'false' or misguided ideology may be the result of a mixture of ignorance, indifference, manipulation, compliance or concem for short-term interests (e.g. not to lose oné s job, getting a pay-rise) at the expense of longterm, structural interests, such as ownership of the means of production, or at least shared planning and decision making The contemporary 'alienation' of the working class in times of the hegemony of liberal market ideologies is a well-known example in point: large segments of the working-class no longer vote socialist nor even social-democratic. Having obtained a minimum of job security and income, they adopt more or less conservative market ideologies or forms of liberal individualism.

The social dimensions of this problem will be dealt with later (see Chapter 11). Here, I focus on the cognitive aspect of this classical issue in the theory of ideology. What, indeed, is consciousness exactly? In the description of the issue in the previous paragraph, I have freely replaced false consciousness by false ideologies. That is, consciousness is obviously taken as a'state of mirad', in this case of sets of beliefs. More specifically, since the 'consciousness' of whole groups or classes is involved, these beliefs must be socially shared. Hence, ,the most adequate translation of the term in my

framework would simply be that of social representation. This comprises not only basic ideologies of the group, but also their attitudes and knowledge. The advantage of such a broad definition of this vague term is that not only value systems and judgements may be involved, but also knowledge.

Indeed, the concept of false consciousness is also used in order to denote ignorance of the 'real' social facts, for instance about the interests of specific social arrangements, policies or practices. Again, such ignorance may result from widespread indifference and apathy, which may again result from oppression or partial satisfaction with the status quo. Or it may more actively be inculcated through biased information or by other forms of ideological manipulation by dominant groups. In that case ideology as false consciousness of dominated group A in fact implies the acceptance of a hegemonic ideology of dominant group B, for instance as those beliefs that misrepresent social inequality as the allegedly natural or immutable nature of the current social and moral order. In other words, the notion of 'false' here also implies conceptions about truth and falsity of beliefs and ideologies about social life, to be discussed in Chapter 11.

In sum, my analysis of the traditional notion of 'false consciousness' proposes to make the notion of 'consciousness' more explicit, first of all, by using the term 'social representation', including knowledge as well as (evaluative) attitudes and ideologies. Second, the notion of 'false' may be assigned two different meanings: (1) wrong, partial, incomplete, biased or otherwise misguided factual beliefs (which presupposes that there is 'correct' or 'true' knowledge; see Chapter 11), and (2) evaluative beliefs that lead to judgements and social practices that are not in the interest of the own group, and may be in the interest of a dominant group. After this conceptual clarification of a classic notion, I later study in more detall which discursive conditions and what social situations may bring about such non-self-serving social representations.

Having somewhat clarified the notion of (false) consciousness, we remain with the empirical question whether the main (Marxist) theses of ideological domination and inculcation and the construction of 'misguided' ideologies by dominated groups is correct in the first place. That is, first of all, there may not be just one 'dominant' (class) ideology in the first place, but a complex structure of elite ideologies that may mutually compete for control or hegemony. 2

Second, although it is plausible that when the ideological elites have control over the means of ideological production (especially politics, education and the media) their social representations about society may be quite influential, this does not entail that dominated groups will actually adopt such representations. Whereas such ideological influence may be plausible in situations in which no alternative knowledge and opinion sources are available or accessible, and if dominant attitudes do not obviously clash with the immediate interests of dominated groups and their members (typically so in racist ideologies), such inculcation is much less obvious when group

members are able to observe directly the contradictions between the inculcated ideologies and attitudes and their everyday experiences. Indeed, if such were the case, social and individual resistance and change would be difficult or even impossible. These issues will be 3dealt with in more detail when I study the social dimensions of ideologies.

Consciousness as awareness

A related problem of the definition of (false) consciousness, and hence of ideologies, is whether people who have' them are actually 'aware' of them. We already have seen in the previous chapter that this is not necessarily the case. Social members are barely aware of many of the social representations they have, and of the ways these control their social practices and evaluations. As we shall see later for the notion of 'common sense', ideologies may be or seem so 'natural' that people doñ t even realize they have them. As is the case for knowledge of natural language (people' s shared competence), ideologies often are simply part of everyday life, and taken for granted. 4

While this is true and probably applies to many ideologies, it is hardly a property of all ideologies. Some ideologies are explicitly 'invented' in the appropriate historical and social circumstances and explicitly propagated among group members. Especially for dominated groups, thus, it is crucial that the ideology be made and kept conscious, and there are many organizational practices that will make sure that such is the case: media messages, party or group meetings, socialization events, initiation rites, propaganda, and so on, will make sure that members leam to be aware of the ideological basis of their group membership. 5

Unlike much implicit grammatical knowledge, some ideologies may partially be made explicit in everyday discourse, for example when people defend their own ideologies or attack others. Parts of the arguments in such debates will be based on ideological principies that may need to be formulated explicitly as premises of an argumentation. This means that language users of the ideological group get frequent 'exercisé in acquiring the group ideology.

Whereas oppositional ideologies by defmition will tend to be more explicit and conscious among group members, dominant ideologies will precisely tend to be implicit and denied, or felt to be 'natural' by their members. Such group members may indeed be unaware of their ideologies (typically so of male chauvinism, racism, etc.) until they are challenged by members of the other group.

Although the notion of 'consciousness' may be clear in it its everyday sense, it is theoretically hardly explicit. Being conscious of, being aware of or realizing something, first of all, is a 'state of mirad'. For instance, it may mean that active processes of thinking, mental arguing or simply information search have access to specific information. If so, people are able to use such information in arguments, or for further processes of inference.

In other words, there are many types or grades of 'consciousness' between totally explicit awareness and knowledge on the one hand, and largely implicit knowledge and 'mere' use as %ved experiencé on the other hand. This distinction is socially often associated with that between 'ideologues' and the 'masses', a distinction we need to analyse as part of the social analysis of ideologies.

Cognitively, the distinction means that at least some group members — and for each group this fraction may be different in size — not only share the ideology but also explicitly know its major tenets, and are able to talk about them as such, and even argue for them as such. It has been frequently observed that such explicit ideological self-awareness is rare, and usually limited to leaders, opinion-leaders and other elites. These are also those who have the function to formulate and persuasively inculcate the relevant ideological beliefs among group members — for example via propaganda — or who 6are able to explain relevant everyday events in terms of the ideology.

On the other hand, such explicit knowledge of ideological beliefs may be limited to only a few basic beliefs, or only be accessible in their more specific form, for instance as opinions in particular attitudes. For instance, people may be unable to spell out general racist or ethnocentric principies as such, but they very well know that they disapprove of liberal immigration or of preferential job and housing allocation to minorities or refugees. That is, in that situation, their knowledge is still explicit, general and social, and may be expressed as such: 'We in our community think that .. Another intermediate stage of awareness is when group members have such attitudes on some issues, but not on other relevant ones. For instance, they may share a prejudiced attitude on immigration, but have (as yet) no ethnic attitude on educatión or language use.

Finally, largely implicit are those ideological opinions that only exist at the level of models of concrete events: for example when someone does not want a foreign neighbour, but does not generalize or rationalize this explicitly in terms of group attitudes ('We doñ t want foreign neighbours because ..."). Social interests in this case are completely translated and integrated into personal interests. I surmise, though, that such totally implicit knowledge and attitudes are rare in most contemporary societies, where most members have access to the mass media: in such a situation people quickly learn to legitimate their personal opinions in terms of the shared attitudes of the group. Systematic discourse analysis of ideological text and talk provides insight into these various leyels or grades of ideological awareness.

Also, I later need to demonstrate whether and how such awareness may be enhanced (or suppressed) by communication: for example by party or group propaganda, teaching, seminars, meetings, media and so on. The fact that many ideological groups organize various forms of 'consciousness raising' or 'awareness training' suggests that such forms of ideological explication may be an important organizational feature of ideological groups, especially for dominated groups or social movements.

The contemporary uses of the notion of consciousness in cognitive science are quite different from the traditional meaning of (false) consciousness. In current debates the concept of consciousness applies to the complex problem of how we can explain how brains can be associated with the (self-) consciousness of minds. In many respects this problem boils down again to the eternal problem of brain—mind identity and difference. Once it is accepted that, at some level of analysis, brains also have mind-like qualities, we at the same time explain the elusive notion of consciousness — for example, in tercos of knowledge of self, knowledge about the present context, and especially in terms of ongoing mental processes like thinking (including the ability of people to be able to think about themselves and their own thinking). It is this kind of consciousness that especially characterizes the ongoing construction of mental models of experience (see Chapter 7).

With our contemporary knowledge about the brain and the mind, there does not seem to be an additional property of either of them that needs special explication in terms of consciousness or awareness. An operating human mind is by definition 'conscious' when people know about themselves, their ongoing activities and their ongoing thoughts. Then there is the distinction between 'conscious' and 'automatic' processing of information. This suggests that consciousness and mind cannot simply be identified — processing in the first case involves self-awareness of short-term memory processes, or as knowledge of what one is now doing. In Chapter 7 it was proposed to represent at least part of this knowledge in experience and context models, which therefore may also be seen as the kind of overall mental monitor sometimes associated with awareness. Of course, this does not solve all problems related -to the notion of consciousness, but for my discussion it should do.'

Awareness and denial

Finally, we need to realize that more-or-less explicit knowledge of ideological beliefs of group members who positively identify with a group usually implies positive acceptance of such beliefs. This also means positive selfpresentation and description of such beliefs. It is well known for instance that virtually all racists will deny that they are racists, and many of them seem to reject racist ideologies when described as such. 8 However, when not described as racist, but, for example, as nationalist, or as 'normal' or 'natural' beliefs in favour of the own group, then the same ideological beliefs may well be perfectly acceptable. In other words, knowledge and acceptance of ideologies and their derived opinions by group members usually implies acceptance of ideologies-as-described-by-the-group-itself.

The converse is true for the rejection or change of (other) ideologies, as is the case for anti-communism and anti-racism, which are based on otherdescription of ideologies. Such opposite ideologies may again be reflected in the argumentative, explanatory or legitimating discourse of group members

sharing the ideologies thus criticized, for instance in well-known disclaimers such as 'I am not a racist, but .. or '1 am not a sexist, but ..', and so on. Indeed, given the negative meaning of the concept of ideology in everyday usage, groups and their members may deny that they have an ideology in the first place. Thus, being in favour of market-freedom will seldom be selfdescribed by its adherents as a belief that characterizes a 'capitalise ideology, or even as a 'liberal' ideology. Similarly, Christians or Muslims will not usually self-describe themselves as adherents of religious ideologies. At most, terms such as 'philosophy', 'principies', 'convictions' or simply'belief(s)' will be acceptable as self-descriptions of ideologies.

I shall later investigate such strategies of self-description, denial and legitimation in the expression and defence of ideologies in more detall. Por my present discussion such examples only show that people are aware of conflicting ideologies, that they know that their expression of specific opinions may be 'heard as' expressions of a normatively unacceptable ideology, and that they usually self-represent and defend their own ideologies in positive terms.

10 Common S ense

The meanings of 'common sense'

Related to the notions of consciousness and awareness is another sociocognitive notion that plays a central role in contemporary discussions of ideology, namely, common sense. This notion has roots in different philosophical and sociological traditions.

First of all, it is often associated with Antonio Gramsci's contributions to the theory of ideology, and especially with the concept of hegemony.' As soon as groups and their members accept a dominant ideology as a reflection of their own goals, desires or interests, or as a representation of a natural or otherwise legitimate social order, their ideologies may turra into beliefs that are taken for granted or simply common sense. Ideological dominance and hegemony is 'perfect' when dominated groups are unable to distinguish between their own interests and attitudes and those of dominant groups. In that case, they may not even be able to see conflicting ideologies (even when in their own best interests) as viable or acceptable alternatives. I shall later come back to the social dimensions of such forms of ideological compliance.

Another main source of the notion of common sense may be found in phenomenological microsociology and ethnomethodology, for example as inspired by Alfred Schütz. 2 Here common sense is simply defined in terms of the implicit social knowledge that group members take for granted in their everyday social practices. This members' knowledge is essentially shared lay-knowledge, and should be distinguished from elite or theoretical formulations or explications of knowledge. Indeed, compared with explicit, scientific knowledge, commonsense knowledge may sometimes be described as wrong, biased, misguided or otherwise unfounded. However, outside such a critical account of common sense, it should be emphasized that whatever the truth-status of commonsense beliefs, they are usually true and accepted by the people who hold them, and will therefore be at the basis of their everyday experiences and interactions, that is, their practical accomplishments. In other words, for group members they are true 'for all practical purposes'.

Describing and explaining such mundane practices, therefore, also requires making explicit the similarly mundane beliefs (methods, rules, etc.) that group members take for granted. This means that their actions, including their discourses, will be described from their own point of view, and