прагматика и медиа дискурс / Teun A van Dijk - Ideology

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Structures and Strategies

Modes of description

If there is anything a theory of ideology must provide, then, it is an account of the structures of ideologies. Few topics in earlier approaches to ideology have been ignored so consistently as the simple question: If there are ideologies, then what do they look like? No sophisticated structuralism was necessary to spell out the typical components, the building blocks of ideologies, and how these are combined in various pattems. Yet, this seldom happened, so that ideologies usually remained in an analytical limbo, somewhere between 'systems of ideas' and 'social interests', where everybody could project into them what they wanted.

For contemporary psychology, linguistics and discourse analysis, as well as for some of the social sciences, such questions of structure are routine — describing, analysing and explaining phenomena first of all means that we should specify their structures and their functions. Such analyses may be static-structuralist, or dynamic proceSsual. The first, as we know it from modem grammars, specifies the structural components or units, as well as the principies (tales, norms or other regularities) of their composition in larger units. 'The more dynamic approach, familiar in psychology, microsociology and conversation analysis, spells out the actual processes, moves or strategies, that is, the mental or interactional dynamics of construction, for instance as an account of how social actors or language users go about, online,'cloing or 'making' such structural units as mental representations, actions or discourses.

Structural versus strategic analysis

I shall henceforth refer to these alternative modes of description as the structural and the strategic approach. The first analyses objects as finished products, the latter characterizes the ways in which such objects are gradually built up or interpreted. These approaches may be seen as fundamentally different, as true alternatives, or as complementary ways of accounting for the same phenomena, depending on oné s philosophy of language, discourse, interaction or cognition. The more strategic approach would then seem to account more adequately for what social actors, thinkers or language users are actually doing in concrete situations, whereas the structural approach would be more abstract and context-free, and rather

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account for what social actors know, or what the product or result is of their strategic thinking or action. 1

At the moment, both in psychology, as well as in conversation analysis and the social sciences, the more dynamic, strategic approach is more popular after the earlier, structuralist phase. Yet, as suggested, such approaches are in fact complementary. First of all, both are abstract, both operate with abstract categories, and both operate with some kind of rules. Even when analysing the dynamics of cognitive processes or social interaction, we operate at various levels of abstraction, with theoretical constructs accounting for what is being observed. Thus, conversation analysts may do so in tercos of actions, turns, moves and their sequencing in talk, whereas psychologists operate with cognitive units such as concepts, propositions, mental representations or networks, and the strategies of their mental manipulation in production and understanding. And neither cognitive psychologists nor those who analyse interaction and conversation operate at the various physical, physiological or auditory levels of 'reality'. That is, any abstract account of construction processes or strategies presupposes some kind of components or structural units known and used by information processors as social actors.

That is, also a strategic approach assumes that speakers know what structures are more or less well formed, and what rules or other structural principies are available to them as (mental and social) resources when engaged in strategic construction. In that respect, thus, the structural and the strategic approach are complementary approaches to the description of the various phenomena of cognition and interaction.

Similar remarks may be made for other, more complex social structures, such as groups, organizations, group relationships, and whole societies, which also may be structurally accounted for -in terms of their conceptual building blocks and the principies of their construction, on the one hand, or the strategic processes of their actual operation, construction, reproduction, formation or change, on the other hand.

Abstract versus practical competence

There is, however, one difference between these two approaches that is more fundamental. Structural approaches tend to be more abstract and contextfree, in the sense of characterizing ideal types or general patterns, and tend to ignore variations, 'deviations' and 'errors'. Modem structural and generative grammars and earlier psycholinguistics usually take such an approach. Under the influence of new directions in cognitive psychology, socio-linguistics and conversation analysis, such abstract normativity was relinquished for an account that focused on the on-line, ongoing processes or strategies of what actors are actually thinking, saying or doing, including individual, contextual variations and 'errors'.

Instead of the neatly separated levels of grammars or other structural theories (e.g. those of argumentation and narration), and the theoretical

distinction between langue' and'parolé or between 'competence' and 'performance', the dynamic approach emphasizes that people think, speak and act strategically. This means, among other things, that they follow various goals, operate or act at various levels of production or understanding at the same time and, while doing so, make mistakes, have lapses of memory, get confused, or take short-cuts. Despite such'imperfectioñ, they

'are usually able to repair these and to re-interpret the data at hand. In sum, they are clearly competent in managing this bewildering amount of tasks to accomplish rather successfully, though not perfectly, what they set out to do, namely, understand something, say something or do something in a specific context, often jointly with other people. In that respect, the strategies of text comprehension are not much different from those of conversation and interaction. Both reqüire an abstract or normative competence, as well as a more practical competence or ability.

Dynamic processes of thinking and acting are possible only when people also know and share more abstract rules and structures. They often know what sentences, sentence sequences, actions or interactions are more or less well formed, acceptable or understandable. Such knowledge and judgements are not merely displayed in ongoing discourse. Sometimes they may also be applied in a more abstract, context-free fashion, because their knowledge is not limited to one situation or to one token, but necessarily more general, and hence abstract. This allows them to adequately produce and interpret a potentially infinite number and variety of different perceptions, discourses or actions. In sum, although the structural and strategic approaches have a different flavour and focus on rather different aspects of thought, discourse and interaction, they always presuppose each other, and a fully fledged account should integrate them both.

Structures and strategies of social cognition

It is against this general background that we also should approach the question of the structures of ideology, defined as the underlying frameworks of the socially shared beliefs of group members, as explained in the previous chapter. Such ideologies are abstract, and hence a more 'structuralise approach seems more appropriate. Unlike discourse and action, ideologies, as we understand them, are not locally produced in the sense of shaped by each specific social context, by a single speaker and utterance (see Chapter 22 for this concept of context). They do not vary from one moment to the next, and are not strategically adapted to individual recipients. On the contrary, given their social, group-based functions, they must be relatively stable and a context free resource for many group members in many situations. Again, in that sense, ideologies are like grammars, defined as abstract systems of knowledge (rules) that enable all competent speakers of a language community to communicate in many different contexts.

On the other hand, ideologies are of course context-sensitive if we use a broader concept of 'context', including the relevant dimensions of social

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structure, such as groups and institutions, social relations of power, historical development, and so on. Given the earlier definitions, ideologies are formed and changed as a function of such (broader) social 'contexts', although such changes are usually rather slow. To avoid further confusion, I shall not use this broader, commonsense notion of 'contexe, and instead use the sociological terco 'social structure', or else the terco social 'rnacrocontext' to denote the properties of the social structure that are specifically relevant for a specific ideology.

That ideologies themselves are relatively stable does not mean that the expressions and uses of ideologies are not variable, strategic and contextsensitive. On the contrary, the theory will precisely need to spell out how such expressions of ideologies are adapted by individual social actors and strategically tailored to the situation at hand. So much so, that they may even seem to be non-existent in a particular situation. To wit, sexist men will not continuously make sexist remarks in al situations. Thus, whereas

sions of ideologies in social practices will be variably occasioned and contextually managed, we assume that ideologies themselves, as well as other shared social representations, need to be relatively stable.

Such stability is necessary in light of the cognitive and social functions ideologies have for the many different members of a group in different situations. Ingroup co-operation, continuity and reliability of action and judgement and many other properties of successful group membership and social practices would be impossible without at least a minimum of stability. In the same way as language users would be unable to speak and understand their language without a more or less stable grammar, group members would be unable to accomplish their daily practices and social judgements without more or less stable social representations such as knowledge, attitudes and ideologies, of which abstract ideologies are necessarily the most stable socio-cognitive constructs.

On the other hand, even such more or less stable representations need to be acquired, changed or abolished by groups and their members, and such processes of change, though slow, of course need an account of a more dynarnic nature. That is, all structures, also those of ideologies, eventually also need an account of their active construction (formation or change) by group members in social contexts.

Schemata

Whereas structural analysis is a well-known and quite sophisticated procedure in linguistics and discourse analysis, the structural account of cognition in general, and of social cognition in particular, remains at a relatively modest level of theoretical sophistication. We have seen that the overall architecture of the mind is a fairly simplistic construct, with some overall distinctions between short-term and long-term memory, and between episodic and semantic memory. Beliefs may be represented in (similarly

simplified) propositions or networks, and belief-clusters may in tum be organized by various schemata.

This schematic approach is a relatively plain counterpart of structural analysis in linguistics, and usually lacks the more dynamic dimension needed to account for the construction, uses or changes of such schemata. Thus, if we want to explain how people perceive objects, scenes or events, how they produce or understand sentences and stories, the knowledge they have to do so is assumed to be organized in such schematic patterns. People have ideal, abstract or prototypical schemata for the structures of a chair, an event, a story, people, groups as well as social structures. It has become standard practice in psychology to specify and distinguish event-schemata, people-schemata and story-schemata, among others .a

Such schemata of naive, commonsense knowledge usually consist of a number of characteristic categories (such as the complication and the resolution in a story), that may be combined in a specific order and hierarchy, and allowing for variable terminal elements. Typically, as is the case in the generative grammar of sentences, such structures are represented in tree-like (directed) graphs, consisting of a top node, several edges and a number of lower-level nodes representing subordinate (included) categories.

Note that what is being described here is not real-world objects, but our socially shared, conventional and cultural knowledge about such objects, that is, mental structures or representations. It need not be emphasized again that these structures are merely abstract, theoretical accounts of the organization of socio-cultural knowledge. Yet, although many alternatives could be imagined, they should not be arbitrary; they need to account for empirical phenomena of actual understanding, discourse and action. Some knowledge structures better account for how people go about perceiving, speaking and acting than others. For instance, a hierarchical structure may better explain differences in availability or accessibility of certain topor high-level categories than structures that are not organized that way.

However, an account of the organization of the mind that is closer to a neural model of the brain might provide altemative theoretical accounts that are based on (neural) nodes or pathways that are in various stages of readiness or excitation. Theoretically, these may be no more than notational variants if their descriptive and explanatory power in the account of information processing, thinking, speaking or understanding is the same. That is, at lower, more detailed levels of processing, neural models of representation and processing may be more relevant, whereas at the higher, more complex level, other representational formats for knowledge, such as abstract schemata, may be theoretically more useful. 3

The same may be true for actual processing of schemata — at a fairly high and complex level, people process information linearly, as is the case in the understanding of words and sentences or the execution of actions. However, as soon as we want to account for the full complexity of such tasks at all levels, we must assume that processing needs to be 'massively parallel' as

the preferred phrase of connectionist theories goes. If we add all the levels that account for, for example, discourse production and understanding (phonetic, phonological, lexical, syntactic, semantic, stylistic, interactional, pragmatic, contextual, etc.), the number of structures being processed in relation to such beliefs is so high that we must assume that these processes operate in parallel. Unfortunately, we know as yet very little about the details of such parallel, neural processing and 'representatioñ when applied to belief systems.

Scripts

Structural descriptions of social representations may also take a more dynamic form, especially when they aim to render the structures of events and actions. Thus, the notion of script has been widely used to account for the knowledge people have about the stereotypical events of their culture, such as celebrating a birthday, an initiation ritual, going to the supermarket, or participating in a university class, among myriad other well-known events. 4 As the script-metaphor suggests, such knowledge is represented in terms of a setting, time, location and a sequence of events and actions and the typical or optional actors that participate in them, like students and professors in classes, and pilots, flight attendants and passengers in air travel. Of course, we may imagine other types of structures, as long as they are able to account adequately for the actual mental and social activities of people.

It should be emphasized again that such knowledge is general and abstract. In order to be applicable in the very large number of possible situations people may be involved in, we must either assume that such structures themselves are infinitely variable (in a way similar to that in which the rules of a grammar allow the structural specification of an infinite number of possible sentences), or that the abstract schemata are being used by flexible strategies, which may tailor them to each particular situation. There are also intermediate solutions, where schemata or scripts are assumed to be built up of smaller structural units (in the way that 'paying' is a sequence of basic actions that may be found in most economic interactions, like buying a product, or paying for a ticket in the movies) that may be combined and hence vary in a more flexible way. 5 But even then, actual variation is practically infinite, given the (theoretically) infinite ways of accomplishing these component basic actions. So, any account, whether a more structural or a more strategic one, has or needs to be complemented with flexible rules or strategies that adapt structural categories or units to their variable uses by different people in different situations. This is as true for the production and comprehension of sentences, as it is true for everyday conversations, complex institutional dialogues, or for more or less complex social acts such as going to the movies, managing a firm or governing a country.

The main point in all these cases is (a) that we need to assume socioculturally shared and mentally represented knowledge, (b) that such knowledge needs to be organized so that it can be effectively acquired, accessed and changed, and (c) that such knowledge needs (internal or externa» strategic means for its variable and effective uses by individual users in concrete situations. Later we shall see that we need to add a number of social properties of knowledge — it is not acquired, used and changed in abstract situations, but in social situations by social actors, as well as in institutions, organizations and whole cultures.

Organizing evaluations

With all their theoretical limitations (most schema theories are not exactly examples of formal explicitness and conceptual sophistication), these various approachés to the account of the structures and strategic uses of knowledge have been relatively successful. It is not surprising, therefore, that similar schema-theoretic roads have been followed in social psychology. 6 Thus, if people have schemata or scripts for stores, stores, stories and storytelling they probably also have them for people, groups, intergroup relations, domination, organizations, governments and democracy. The same is true for the myriad of communicative events that describe or constitute such social objects, such as conversations, negotiations, parliamentary debates, impression management as well as corporate management.

The theoretical task then consists in spelling out these various structures as well as the strategies of their usage. This is easier said than done. One question is whether it is likely that all or at least many of these mental representations have the same or similar categories or whether their overall structures are at least the same or similar, if only because of obvious reasons of cognitive economy. Intuitively, we may assume that there are considerable differences: our beliefs about chairs, chairpersons and chairing a meeting probably do not have the same internal organization. Yet, chairs may have structures that are at least comparable to many other objects, chairpersons are not very different from other people or roles, and chairing a meeting is not essentially different from many other forms of interaction. So, we may have object-schemata, person-schemata, role-schemata, and interaction-schemata, and similar schemata (or scripts, or scenarios, etc.) maybe developed for groups, relations of domination, organizations, civil wars, democracy or, indeed, ideologies.

However, there are some complications. What has been said, aboye, especially applies to the organization of knowledge, but does it also apply to the organization of opinions, attitudes and judgements? We may postulate person-schemata and group-schemata, and maybe scripts for parliamentary sessions and civil wars, but how do we organize the opinions and attitudes we have about such social objects or events?

Despite a number of modest attempts, 7 few detailed representation formats have been provided for evaluative structures. In fact, we do not even

know whether such evaluations should be represented separately from our knowledge about the objects of judgement. If people have a group-schema about, say, Turks, does this mean that such a schema should also feature the opinions and the prejudices people may have about Turks?

For instance, a simple network could have 'Turks' as a node, and this node would be related to nodes that specify our knowledge about Turkey as a country, about Turkish as a language, about Turkish society and culture and so on, but that central node would also be related to nodes representing our evaluation of Turks as a people (or about the Turkish language, culture, religion, etc.). If many or most of the important (or central) nodes of the Turk-schema or Turk-network were negative, then this would represent a prejudice. Such a simple, integrated approach, where factual and evaluative beliefs are represented in one group-schema, meets a number of criteria for cognitive organization, namely, those of simplicity and economy. The question is whether it works — does such a schema account for prejudiced discourse and interaction, and does it explain discrimination, among many other forms of biased perception and interaction?

Attitude structures

Although at present we doñ t have a clear answer to such questions, we may however take a different theoretical approach and assume that in the same way as factual and evaluative beliefs can be distinguished, we may also distinguish between factual belief structures, on the one hand, and evaluative belief structures on the other hand. At the moment, this is merely an analytical distinction: it may very well be that in the mirad (in the brain) these form one network. But, following the common sense of social members, we may provisionally distinguish between cultural knowledge, on the one hand, and group knowledge and group attitudes on the other hand.

One argument for this separation, apart from differences in social practices and discourse, is that knowledge is socio-culturally based on different methods of assessment and verification, namely, truth criteria such as observation, reliable sources, argurnentation, proof or experimentation. Opinions are constructed and combined along very different methods of assessment, and following different criteria, such as values, group goals and interests, and social group relations. To establish where Turks come from in the world, what language they speak, or what religion they have, among other things, requires 'informatioñ from newspapers, textbooks, atlases, everyday conversation and observation, as well as inferences from other knowledge, for instance about languages, religions, Islam, politics or the Mediterranean. ,When expressing such knowledge, as such, language users presuppose that others have similar beliefs (truthful or not) and that the methods to establish the truth of such beliefs or to setde disputes are socioculturally shared.

However, prejudices about Turks are developed and used, and probably organized in quite a different way. First of all, as empirical evidence shows,

people may have negative attitudes about Turks even without having any knowledge about them. Indeed, experiments and everyday experiences show that some people even express prejudices about non-existent peoples! And although most people who have prejudices about other groups usually have at least some knowledge about such groups, knowledge often prevents stereotyping and prejudices. The development of prejudice precisely avoids the methods and reliability criteria of knowledge, such as repeated observation, inference, proof, reliable sources, and relations with other knowledge; hence, obviously, their role as forros of pre-judgement. Generalizations are made from one or two observations, fallacies made in argumentation, unreliable sources are used, if at all, and so on. 8

Even more importantly, apart from such'falliblé information processing and judgement (which characterizes much thinking in general), what counts in the construction of prejudices are the goals, the interests and the values of the group. That is, if the group is Christian, and if Islam is defined as different, opposed to, or even as a threat to Christianity, and hence to Us, then Turks, fike most other Muslims, may be negatively represented on the relevant category of religion. The same may happen for appearance, origin, employment, language, habas or perceived personal traits. In other words, besides the relevant knowledge categories for groups, group members may bring to bear a number of categories that are (for them) essential in the evaluation of other groups. One of these categories may be appearance, so that, for white people, anybody who is not white (and having other features of'Europeañ appearance) may be categorized as essentially different, deviant or dangerous on that dimension. Whether such basic categories have historical or even biological foundations is irrelevant. What counts is their socio-cultural construction and reproduction. People may learn and unlearn that differences of appearance are crucial in categorizing and especially in judging others.

The point then is that in general the structures of evaluative social representations such as attitudes (and as we shall see, of ideologies) are probably organized in a way that reflects or facilitates their social (groupbased) functions, their social construction, and their social uses in everyday social practices. ff skin colour is relevant to categorize and judge negatively other groups in order to be able to discriminate against them or oppress them, then such a real (or indeed imaginary) characteristic may become a category of the evaluative schema that defines (ethnic) attitudes in general and prejudices in particular.

Traditional approaches in the social psychology of attitudes follow some of these arguments in their assumption that attitudes always consist of three components: a cognitive, an evaluative and an emotional one. 9 Obviously, a three-component assumption does not tel us much about detailed structure or organization, only about the nature of the beliefs involved in attitudes. I have further argued that, whatever the 'real' organization of beliefs in the brain—mind, I prefer to keep factual beliefs apart from evaluative beliefs, and

hence distinguish between knowledge and attitudes. As defined, the latter are only evaluative.

Finally, since emotions (when not confused with evaluations) are strictly personal and contextual, they cannot be part of socially shared, abstract group attitudes. They may, however, become triggered and mingled with the actual uses of attitudes in concrete situations by individual members. I may now be angry (or desperate) about a political decision, an emotion that may be triggered by activating or constructing a negative opinion in the current context. But a group cannot be continuously 'angry', in the strict sense of being angrily aroused. Socially shared, continuous 'affece, such as hate or anger, is not, in my view, an emotion, but a forro of strong evaluation (which may of course be expressed in the language of emotions). It is highly unlikely that there are groups all of whose members are constantly emotionally aroused about some issue, but as is the case for ethnic prejudices, they may well share and maintain a negative evaluation about other groups.

Following a more fruitful way of cognitive inquiry into the more detailed organization of evaluative belief clusters, I assume that group members develop schemata or other abstract structures for the organization of social judgement. Such attitude-schemata for groups, thus, will feature those general categories that have developed as a function of the goals, interests as well as the social and cultural contexts of group perception and social practices. In some socio-historical situations this may be skin colour (as with prejudices of whites against blacks), religion (as in anti-semitism), gender (as in sexism), political ideology (as in anti-communism), and so on. Thus, whatever is relevant for evaluation, and the practices legitimated in tercos of a negative (or positive) evaluation, may thus be selected as a category of the group-attitude-schema.

These schemata may be different for different types of group relationships, narnely, those based on origin, ethnicity, gender, age, class, profession, and so on, but the same principies will be at work in the construction of attitudes. Note again that although it is plausible that both knowledge and attitudes usually operate in the conduct of discourse and other social practices, attitudes are distinct from knowledge, and so are their internal structures. Categories in attitudes may be used that have no basis in knowledge at all, but that are simply useful for negative judgement. The same is true for the order or relevance of such categories in the scherna.

Thus, in ethnocentric and racist attitudes, the appearance of other group members (even when 'objectively' barely different from that of our own group) may take the highest position in the category, and the same may be true for language, religion, socio-economic status, occupation, habits or attributed personal 'character' (e.g. being lazy or criminal)

Interestingly, and as we shall see in more detail later, the selection and ordering of categories of judgement are obviousiy not arbitrary, but a function of the social position, goals, resources, activities and other interests of the group that shares such an attitude. For the unemployed 'They take away our jobs' may become a prominent judgement of a prejudiced attitude,