прагматика и медиа дискурс / Teun A van Dijk - Ideology

models of events. For instance, participant roles are important in ideological communication, for instance in the management of credibility. Power and status of speakers is a well-known condition in the way assertions are accepted by recipients. However, conversation analytical research would correctly observe that such social properties are not simply something people 'have', but that they are (also) interactional accomplishments. Status and power are contextually enacted and thus reproduced in many subtle ways, such as bodily position, distance between speakers, clothing and props, and the ways speakers control talk.

Crucially then, models and their representations depend on who says what, and interactional management may control such effects. For instance, speakers may be prevented from saying dispreferred things by interruptions, or alternatively be encouraged to speak by selective turn allocation if they are expected to say preferred things. Similarly, interactional strategies of displaying agreement and disagreement play an important role in the management of event models and their opinions. Specific speech acts (commands, orders) may be enacted to implement social power, but also to emphasize the negative characteristics of outgroup members (accusations, blaming the victim). These are merely some of the many examples of the ways interactional moves and strategies express, implement, enact or accomplish ideologically based opinions, perspectives and stances of speakers, and the ways the models of recipients are shaped according to the preferences or interests of speakers or the groups or organizations they represent.

Manipulation

Ideological communication is often associated with various forms of manipulation, with strategies that manage or control the mind of the public at large, and with attempts to thus manufacture the consent or fabricate a consensus in the interests of those in power. 1. Indeed, modem power and ideological hegemony are precisely defined in tercos of effective strategies in the accomplishment of compliance and consent, so that people will act as desired out of their own free will. In that case, power and dominance will seem natural, legitimate and commonsensical, and will be taken for granted without significant opposition.

Formulated in this way, we get a simplified picture of the complex processes at work in the enactment of dominance and the accomplishment of hegemony. Without a much more detailed study of the social, cognitive and discursive elements of the structures, strategies, processes or representations involved in this forro of the 'modem' reproduction of dominance and ideologies, such analyses barely go beyond easy slogans or superficial social analysis and critique.

In the previous chapters and aboye, I have outlined some ideas about the mental structures, social conditions and discursive reproduction involved in the reproduction of dominance and hegemony. A study of manipulation,

mind control or the manufacture of consent needs to take place in such a complex framework." Aboye, I have given some examples of how ideologies are expressed and especially persuasively conveyed by text and talk, and how models and social representations may be effected by the structures of discourse and context.

Thus, manipulation basically involves forms of mental control of which recipients are not or barely aware, or of which they cannot easily control the consequences. Models are constructed of events in a way that has implications for the construction of shared social representations people have about the world, which in turn influence the development or change of ideologies. Given the fundamental role of ideologies in the management of social cognitions and models for discourse and other social practices, ideological control and compliance are the ultimate goal of hegemony. We have seen how specific discourse structures and strategies, such as the control of topics, style or interaction strategies, may have such influences on models and other representations of the mind. Because of such discursive properties, knowledge about events will he incomplete or biased in favour of speakers or their ingroup, and this may affect more general knowledge about the world. Even more crucially, this is the case for the management of opinions, in such a way that a negative opinion about specific outgroups seems the most 'natural' or conclusion from the models as persuasively controlled by discourse.

Conclusion

Of the vast richness of discourse structures and strategies I have mentioned only a few. A detailed study will be necessary to atan all possible ways in which contextualized text and talk exhibas and reproduces ideologies. However brief, the discussion shows the basic principles at work. Ideological communication is a double-sided process, in which ideologically based beliefs are expressed (or concealed), and persuasively control the minds of recipients. Mind control is obviously an exceedingly complex process. But also here, some basic formats of ideological influence seem to emerge from the analysis — in order to contribute to the construction of preferred models in a given context, discourse structures must be shaped in such a way that specific model structures are the most likely consequence.

In the ideological situation of dominance, power abuse, group conflict or competition, this in general means that (members of) outgroups need to be treated and portrayed negatively, and (members of) ingroups positively. This principie applies both to the pragmatic or interactional context, as well as to the forms and meanings of text and talk. At each level of analysis, thus, we find emphasis (prominence, importance, focus, etc.) on our good things and their bad things, and vice versa for our bad things and their good things. Besides this control of group-related opinions about Us and Them and their properties and actions, discourse structures more generally control the

management of the structures of models and social representations, for example through explicitness versus implicitness, manifestation versus concealment, levels or details of description, the distribution of agency, responsibility or blame, the relationships between facts, and so on.

In sum, whatever the ideological shape of underlying attitudes, they will appear in models of speakers, and these will try to appropriately and effectively express such social representations in text and talk and their contexts, in a way that most likely results in the construction of preferred models. Often, and especially in what we call manipulation, this happens without the awareness of recipients. It is more or less in this way that ideologies are reproduced in everyday life. Later studies of discourse and ideology will have to spell out the details of the general framework presented here.

The Ideology and Discourse of

Modem Racism

A concrete example

After the theoretical chapters of this book, let me finally analyse a concrete example. In fine with my choice of racism and racist ideologies as illustration of general principies, this chapter examines in some detall the ideology and discourse as expressed in a recent book: The End of Racism: Principies for a Multiracial Society, by Dinesh D'Souza (New York: Free Press, 1995). Also in some of his other books, for example on multiculturalism, D'Souza has made himself a vociferous spokesman of the New Right in the USA, and a staunch defender of conservative ideas. Indeed, we might call D'Souza one of the main'ideologues' of contemporary conservative ideologies in the USA.

In the End of Racism D'Souza deals with what he sees as a 'civilizational crisis' in the USA, and focuses on what he consistently calls the 'pathologies' which, according to him, characterize the African American community in general, and the black'underclass' in particular (in my analysis, words in my running text actually used by D'Souza will be indicated by double quotation marks). Given the size of this book (724 pages), this is no mere ideological tract. On the contrary, D'Souza has set himself the task of writing a broadly documented study of the ethnic and racial situation in the USA. An endorsement by George M. Frederickson in The New York Review of Books, printed on the cover, says: 'The most thorough, intelligent, and well-informed presentation of the case against liberal race policies that has yet appeared.'

Thus, D'Souza deals with what he sees as the breakdown of the 'liberal hopé of race relations in the USA, the origins of racism, slavery, the rise of liberal anti-racism, the civil rights movement, Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism, the IQ debate, fmally culminating in an apocalyptic vision of the 'pathologies' of black culture. In many respects, this book may be seen as the ideological foundation of a conservative programme of race relations in the USA. Since D'Souza is a scholar attached to the conservative think tank of the American Enterprise Institute, we may conclude that his book does not merely express a personal opinion, but also has a powerful institutional backing. We already saw in Chapter 19 that contemporary ideologies are often produced and reproduced by such ideological institutions.

Given his right-wing radicalism in ethnic—racial matters, D'Souza has been severely criticized, and accused of racism (in the introduction to the second edition of the book he discusses and rejects such critique). After having examined his theses and evidence in detall, and analysed the discursive formulation of his underlying ideologies, I have come to the conclusion, with others, that this book indeed articulates a special form of 'cultural racism', celebrating white, Western cultural and civilizational hegemony, and especially problematizing and attacking African-American culture. As is also clear from much of the literature on'modem racism', most forms of racism are no longer biologically based, but take a more 'acceptablé form as cultural racism: others are not vilified for what they are, but for what they do and think. More generally, D'Souza defends ideas that are sometimes called 'symbolic racism': a forceful rejection of any form of affirmative action, a strong repudiation of egalitarian values, problematization of blacks, blaming the victim, and so on. 1 Indeed, he even proposes the repeal of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (p. 544), and he favours 'rational discrimination' in the prívate sphere.

Our ideological and social enemies and Us

Given their multiple group memberships, individuals may acquire and personally adapt several ideologies or ideology fragments. This means that D'Souzá s book is not merely an expression of conservatism and modem racism, but a personal combination of these and other ideologies, attitudes, beliefs, values, models and other social and personal representations.

Yet, where he expresses positions and opinions that seem to be widely shared, at least among conservatives, in the USA (and also in Europe), we may assume that he is not merely writing as an individual, but also as a member of several ideological communities. At the end of his book, thus, he explicitly aligns himself with other 'cultural conservatives' (p. 521). His opinions about multiculturalism, affirmative action, the inner city ghettos and related topics are widely shared by other conservatives in the USA. Hence, abstracting from more personal views, we may read and analyse his book as a formulation of group ideologies. 2

The ideological enemy

Ideologies are often formulated, explicitly or implicitly, as attacks against ideological opponents or enemies. Anti-Communism has been the most prominent example, especially in the USA, of this kind of anti-ideology. In D'Souzá s book, this ideological enemy is what he calls 'cultural relativism', whose major tenet is that all cultures are equal, and that we should not assume any value hierarchy between different cultures. D'Souza traces this tendency to early twentieth century anthropology, and especially to Franz Boas and his students.

Throughout his book, cultural relativism is frequently blamed for virtually all ills of US society, and especially as the ideological source of contemporary 'anti-racise policies and practices in the USA:

[1][The main problem is] Liberal anti-racism. By asserting the equality of all cultures, cultural relativism prevents liberals from dealing with the t ation's contemporary crisis — a civilizational breakdown that affects all groups, but is especially concentrated among the black underclass. (p. 24)

[2]Fundamental liberal principies are being sacrificed at the altar of cultural relativism. In its fanatical commitment to the relativist ideology of group equality, liberalism is inexorably destroying itself. (p. 530).

[3]Relativism has become a kind of virus, attacking the immune systems of institutional legitimacy and public decency. (p. 532)

As these examples also show, the reference to liberalism as an ideological orientation is at least ambiguous. On the one hand, the specific US sense of politically or culturally 'progressive' may be meant by it (as in example 1, whereas D'Souza himself does not deny his allegiance to the original, philosophical-political meaning of the term, as in example 2. We may therefore expect, as was argued in the previous chapters, that the ideological conflict presented in his book will be articulated in starkly polarized terms, where all They think is inherently bad, and all We think is inherently good. The rhetoric and lexical style of these examples expresses this ideological polarization, as is shown in the use of metaphors from the domain of health ('virus', Immune system') in 3 and from traditional religion ('sacrificed on the altar of`), as well as by the use of hyperboles ('civilizational breakdown') in example 1. The rhetorical contrast in 3 suggests that there is a struggle between Us and Tbem. They are enemies who 'attack' us, and We defend — as an 'itnmune system' — legitimacy and decency in the USA. Framed in those terms, the ideological debate turras into a fierce struggle between Good and Evil, as was also the case in classical anti-communism until the Reagan era.

The social enemy

D'Souza and his fellow cultural conservatives not only have an intellectual, ideological enemy, but also a social one, namely, African-Americans. Although, as we shall see in more detail below, he emphasizes that his animosity is not directed against blacks as a'racé, but rather against African-American culture, his special focus on blacks can hardly hide the fact that he is not merely fighting a cultural war. It is this reason why in his book, and its underlying ideology, 'culture' and 'ethnicity' represent the respectable mask behind which (acknowledged) ethnocentrism mingles with various brands of modem racism. Although much of his fury targets the black 'underclass' and its social 'pathologies', he often forgets this specification and problematizes the whole black 'culture', which he sees as coherent and associated with all African-Americans in the USA.

This is a very anti-black book. If D'Souza had more generally been worried by the 'breakdown of civilization', as he so hyperbolically calls the present 'crisis' in the USA, he could have targeted many other social or cultural groups. With many of the same argumenta and examples, he could also have focused on Latinos, on Native Americans, on the 'dependen white underclass, on all unmarried mothers, all criminals, or all minorities who profit of affirmative action. He does not. He specifically singles out blacks, and his extremely biased, if not racist, judgements barely leave another conclusion than that these are his real social enemies:

[4]The last few decades have witnessed nothing less than a breakdown of civilization within the African-American community. The breakdown is characterized by extremely high rates of criminal activity, by the normalization of illegttimacy, by the predo minan ce of single-parent families, by high levels of addiction to alcohol and drugs, by a parasitic reliance on government provision, by a hostility to academic achievement, and by a scarcity of independent enterprises. (p. 477)

This quote sums up D'Souza's major points of resentment against the African-American community. Indeed, he does not speak here of a (relatively small) section of this community, but of the community as a whole. Where many others would talk of 'social problems' of some inner-city areas, D'Souza's view is more apocalyptic. He sees 'nothing less than a breakdown of civilization'. In many places of his book, he explicitly speaks of AfricanAmericans as a 'threat' not only to themselves but to the whole society:

[5]The conspicuous pathologies of blacks are the product of catastrophic cultural change that poses a threat both to the African-American community and to society as a whole. (p. 478)

Whereas conservatives before had communists as the major internal as well as external enemy, this kind of socio-political paranoia now targets blacks. In order to emphasize the 'pathologies' of blacks, the Asian community in the USA is held up as the good example, an example that at the same time serves as a strategic argument against those who might see racism in D'Souza's attacks against blacks:

[6]By proving that upward mobiliry and social acceptance do not depend on the absence of racially distinguishing features, Asians Nave unwittingly yet power- fully challenged the attribution of minority failure to discrimination by the majority. Many liberals are having trouble providing a full answer to the awkward question: 'Why can't an African-American be more like an Asian?'

One might easily explain this racial divide-and-tale principie by the fact that D'Souza himself is an example of the Asian success story (he is from India), but there are few other traces of his Asian (or Indian) allegiances in the book. He does not speak for immigrants or minorities at all. On the contrary, as is true of many conservative immigrants, he completely identifies with Western civilization, and the dominant white majority which, obviously, could not have a more persuasive spokesman when it comes to attacking multiculturalism and affirmative action: who is more credible in attacking the others than one of them? As may be expected, conservative

blacks and other people of colour in the USA are extensively celebrated and promoted, and have foil access to the media and other ideological institutions, especially when they serve as 'useful idiots' and sustain the dominant consensus of the white elites.

Obviously, such groups and group relations need to be located in the more complex, socio-political and intellectual framework of US society. Thus, among the ideological enemies (the 'relativista' or the 'Boasians' — from Franz Boas, famous US anthropologist) he further identifies most liberal (progressive) scholars, politicians and joumafists, proponents of civil rights and affirmative action, anti-racists, and al' those whom he portrays as condoning or having vested interests in the continuation of 'black pathologies'. One stylistic ploy in the derogation of his ideological enemies is to call them 'activists', including professors whose opinions he dislikes. In passing he also includes some other target groups and ideologies of conservative scorn:

[7]activists draw heavily on leftist movements such as Marxism, deconstructionism, and anticolonial or Third World scholarship. (p. 345)

[8]... solutions [of African-American scholar Cornell West] are a quixotic combination of watered-down Marxism, radical feminism, and homosexual rights advocacy, none of which offers any realistic hope for ameliorating black pathologies. (p. 520)

In sum, although not the main target of his ire, his ideological enemies stretch far along the social horizon, and include all progressive, altemative or otherwise non-mainstream groups and the institutions associated with them.

Us

Whereas there is little ambiguity about who bis enemies are, who are We in this polarized representation of the civilizational conflict? As usual in this kind of discourse, We are largely implicit and presupposed, and in need of much less identification. In a large part of this book on the 'breakdown of civilization', We are simply all civilized people. More specifically, also in the historical sections of the book, We are those (mostly Europeans) who invented'Westerñ civilization. Within the context of the USA, We may variously be all non-blacks, or whites, or all those opposed to multiculturalism, affirmative action and state interference.

Whereas his positive descriptions of all these different We-groups with which D'Souza identifies leave no doubt about his allegiances, his closest ideological reference group comprises what he calls the 'cultural conservatives':

[9]The only people who are seriously confronting black cultural deficiencies and offering constructive proposals for dealing with them are members of a group we can call the reformers. Many of them are conservatives... (p. 521)

They are the ones who, at the end of the book, have 'understood' the seriousness of the 'civilizational breakdown' in the African-American community, and have made proposals to amend it. Quite predictably, D'Souza includes a group of conservative blacks among their ranks, and does not seem fazed by the inconsistencies such a selection engenders when he at the same time lambasts the entice African-American community Apparently, and as always, there are exceptions, and those are Our friends.

Since ideologies articulate within and between groups, we now have the first elements of the social framework that sustains D'Souza's ideologies. We know his enemies and we know his friends, and we know that he serves as the ideologue for these friends, and as the ideal opponent of his enemies.

The conflict and the 'crisis'

Ideological struggles are rooted in real political, social or economic conflicts. They do not merely involve arbitrary groups, but involve group relations of power, dominance or competition. At stake is access to scarce social resources, both material as well as symbolic ones. The conflict that serves as the background for the ideological struggle in which D'Souza takes part involves both 'race' and class, and especially focuses on the relations between the white majority and the African-American minority in the USA.

As is also obvious from the historical chapters of his book, this conflict has a long history: European world exploration and colonization, the enslavement of Africans by Europeans (and Arabs), the plantation economy in the rural South, abolition, the emergence of scientific racism, the Jim Crów laws, racial segregation, the civil rights movement, the end of formal segregation and official racism, affirmative action, large scale immigration from Asia and Latin America, multiculturalism in education, and finally the conservative backlash of which D'Souza's book is a salient example.

Despite their 'real' socio-economic backgrounds, conflicts are sociopolitical constructs, which are defined differently by the various groups involved in them, depending on their ideological orientation, group goals and interests, as well as the everyday experiences of their members. Ongoing sociopolitical conflicts such as that of race relations in the USA are characterized not only by the many structural properties of social inequality and occasional reform. They also know a series of 'crises', which are also defined by shared mental representations of (and hence differently interpreted by) groups in conflict. A crisis may occur when one of the participant groups enhances its political, economic or ideological dominance and oppression or when the dominated group engages in explicit forms of resistance. Thus the conservative backlash that coincided with conservative Reagonomics and the victory of neo-liberalism in the 1980s and 1990s, is one of such crises. This crisis in turn found its ideological motivation in the

reaction against the (modest) political and economic gains of AfricanAmericans that resulted from another crisis, namely, the civil rights movement and the social govemment policies of the 1960s and 1970s.

The social and political function of D'Souza's book should be defined against this general background of race relations, politics and policies in the USA, but draws its rhetorical relevance and persuasiveness especially from a self-defined 'civilizational crisis'. That is, structural properties of US society (such as poverty, especially in the black ghettos or overall socio-cultural changes) are interpreted and presented as a major threat. Once defined as 'catastrophic', such a perceived threat demands urgent action and policy, and D'Souza's book provides the ideological principies for such a 'multiracial society', as its subtitle specifies. We have seen that just talking of (well-known) 'problems' will not do in such a rhetorical book. Hence such social problems need to be magnified to a disaster of major proportions, as also the frequently hyperbolic style of D'Souza shows:

[10]. . . the natioñ s contemporary crisis — a civilizational breakdown that affects all groups ... (p.24)

[11]... a deterioration of basic civilizational norms in the ghetto. (p. 241)

[12]The conspicuous pathologies of blacks are the product of catastrophic cultural change that poses a threat both to the African-American community and to society as a whole. (p. 478)

[13]For many whites the criminal and irresponsible black undérclass represents a revival of barbarism in the midst of Western civilization. (p. 527)

In other words, we do not merely have a conflict between two groups, whites and blacks, in the USA, but a momentous struggle, namely, that between (white) 'civilization' and (black) 'barbarism'. And, as may be expected, D'Souza is the hero who has taken on the Herculean task of fighting the forces of barbarism, as also the Greek heroes defended their civilizations against the barbarian foreigners. D'Souza explicitly refers to the Greek history of 'Western civilization' and democracy, as an example which, until today, deserves emulation, including 'rationar, ethnocentric discrimination of the barbarian others. Thus, his struggle is not just one that tries to safeguard the interests and privileges of the dominant, white middle class, but more grandly presents itself as a valiant defence of Western civilization against the onslaught of a 'rainbow' coalition of blacks, immigrants, leftists, gays, lesbians, multiculturalists, Boasian relativists and others who threaten the status quo. In that respect, D'Souza and his book, and the ideologies he defines, are quite coherently conservative and ethnocentric. Let us now try to reconstruct these ideologies and other social representations from his book and then examine in some more detall their persuasive discursive manifestations.