прагматика и медиа дискурс / Teun A van Dijk - Ideology

as just or unjust. Yet, although it may seem as if some groups may develop ideologies which 'cynically' acknowledge that they are not 'just' for other groups, the fundamental social role of positive self-images for most groups will usually entail that groups develop an ideology which they see as ethically good or defensible. Thus, whereas (at least some) proponents of a neo-liberal ideology may recognize that liberalization and other market policies may make the rich richer and the poor poorer, it is likely that the underlying ideology maintains that freedom of the market will eventually benefit all. In that respect, we may generally assume that group ideologies cannot be 'cynical', but always imply positive self-presentation. One possible exception that needs to be further explored may be ideologies of some dominated groups, a 'false consciousness' that may result from manipulative hegemony, in which the own group is represented as negative in relation to dominant groups, as would be the case for forms of interiorized racism.

Ideologies develop as a functional consequence of the conflicts of interest that emerge from goals, preferences or rights that are seen as mutually incompatible. Groups may want to claim, defend, legitimate, explain, or otherwise manage such interests against other groups in society, while at the same time rallying their own members behind such claims so as to make sure that attitudes of individual members, and social practices based on them, co-ordinate and facilitate the realization of ideological goals. In the remaining chapters, I shall further examine such ideological 'contents', and especially their social conditions, consequences and functions in the management of social interpretations, practicés and discourse.

Values

Introduction

Values play a central role in the construction of ideologies. Together with ideologies they are the benchmark of social and cultural evaluation. Like knowledge and attitudes, they are located in the memory domain of social beliefs. That is, we do not take values as social or sociological abstractions, but as shared mental objects of social cognition.

Unlike group beliefs, values have a broader, cultural base. Together with culturally shared knowledge, they are part of the cultural common ground. Whatever the ideological differences between groups, few people in the same culture have very different value systems — truth, equality, happiness, and so on, seem to be generally, if not universally shared as criteria of action and at least as ideal goals to strive for. Of course, there are cultural differences. Some values may not even exist in another culture, or may have different implications in another culture. Also, the hierarchy of the imponance or relevance of values may be different from culture to culture. Whereas in one culture honesty may be fundamental, another culture may emphasize modesty. For these reasons, cultural clashes and conflicts of values, also in communication, are notorious, as is especially clear in variations in politeness, deference or directness of text and talk, among many other differences. 1

Values are shared and known, and applied by social members in a large variety of practices and contexts. Obviously, they form the basis of ah processes of evaluation, and hence for opinions, attitudes and ideologies. Thus, if ideologies are the basis of group beliefs, and if values are in turra broader and more fundamental, values must be the basis of the evaluative systems of a culture as a whole. Indeed, values are the pillars of the moral order of societies.

This fundamental socio-cultural status of values also precludes their reduction to individuals. These may share, adopt or reject the values of their group, but we would not say that personal goals or ideals are values.

Value systems

Despite the frequent use of the notion of value in the social sciences and politics, they are fairly elusive. Usually, and unlike beliefs, they are described in isolated terms, such as truth, intelligence or beauty, or in terms of concepts for which English does not have a single word, such as

'enjoying a good life'. If they are basic building blocks of the evaluations that are involved in social opinions, as attributes that are predicated of any socially relevant object (people, events, actions, situations, etc.), then they might well be atomic concepts. Indeed, truth or beauty hardly seem decomposable in more elementary concepts, unless these would be good and bad, so that 'beauty' would be 'good appearancé , for instance, whereas honesty would be one type of 'good character'.

This attempt at analysis also suggests that values seem to be organized by the fundamental dimensions of everyday life experiences and observation as well as for social action and organization. Thus, we have actitudes that describe positive properties of the mirad (intelligence, smartness, erudition and wisdom), whereas others characterize what we value most about bodies: health, beauty, and so on. Similarly we have a series of values for judgements about personal 'character', such as honesty, integrity, modesty, kindness, openness, patience and so on.

The same is true for actions, which also need to be evaluated routinely, and hence require a complex set of values, such as resolution, decisiveness, speed or efficiency. Interaction requires evaluation by means of a series of social values, such as politeness, tolerance, co-operation, helpfulness or altruism, among many others. As elsewhere, the opposed concepts by definition denote negative evaluations of people, that is, what people generaily would not want to be or do, or be accused of: impoliteness, intolerance and egocentrism. Many of the interaction values mentioned here of course also apply to discourse, as is obviously true for politeness and cooperation.

What is true for action and interaction, also applies to more complex social structures, social relations, organizations and whole societies. This means that democracy, freedom, equality, independence or autonomy are such fundamental societal values. Given the nature of ideologies as basic systems of group beliefs, we may assume that these typical societal values play a special role in them, as is indeed the case — virtually all major social and political ideologies will emphasize one or more of these societal values.

In sum, if we draw an intuitive picture of the personal and social world, each fundamental dimension (mirad, body, character, action, interaction, society) of observation and evaluation has its own special values. Some of these values may be very general and apply across these dimensions, as is true for good and bad, ugly and beautiful.

Finally, the interpersonal and social scope of cultural values probably does not exhaust the system — we also have values to qualify nature or animals, either in very general tercos of beauty, but, as is obvious in environmental ideologies, also in terms of cleanliness, being unspoiled, and so on. The same is true for all objects of our senses, so that for our taste alone we have a long series of values: sweetness, delicateness or smoothness, obviously also culturally variable.

once Invented' as being positive properties of mirad, action or society 'we' would have to strive for. This 'terminal' aspect of ideologies also suggests that they are motivational and goal-oriented; that is, they qualify'ideal' endstates or results of human endeavours.

Values and ideologies

Theoretically, then, values monitor the evaluative dimensions of ideologies and actitudes. That is, basic social opinions are constituted from values when applied to specific domains and issues in society. Thus, if journalists value truth and reliability of reporting, then this is an ideological specification of the cultural value of truth and reliability. The same is true for the selection of the value of equality by feminists, minority groups or anti-racists in the construction of their egalitarian ideologies.

Obviously the selection and construction process by which values are incorporated in ideologies is again self-serving. It should fit the various interests of the group, such as their membership, activities, goals, relations to other groups and resources. In other words, general cultural values may be 'appropriated' by a group, as is typically the case with freedom in neoliberal and conservative ideologies. This is also why the values category itself was added to the ideology schema proposed in the previous chapter: The values selected as primordial for each group constitute the selected benchmark for their identity and self-evaluation, the evaluation of their activities and goals, and especially their evaluations of other groups, underlying goals and judgements of interaction.

Also negatively, values may be used for self-enhancement, as when white racists feel superior to non-whites. This superiority feeling is a summary of a biased comparison process in which We are seen as more intelligent, more efficient, harder working or more democratic than They are. That is, for all values that are especially relevant to us, we self-evaluate Us as better. At most we may grant them superiority on values that are less relevant for us, such as musicality, being good in sports or hospitality.

As we have seen for the example of freedom before, different or even opposed social groups may select the same value, but invest it with very different ideological content. Managers ideologically 'incorporate' (pun intended) the value of freedom as 'freedom of the market' or 'freedom from state interventioñ , as a self-serving ideological goal that guarantees their power and interests. Journalists similarly want to secure their power, interests and resources by emphasizing the freedom of the press, or the freedom of information, obviously primarily for themselves. On the other hand, liberation movements, feminism, and other dominated groups focus on freedom as a guarantee for equality, independence, autonomy and access to scarce social resources, and generally as, 'freedom from oppressioñ .

We see that the positive values that define the moral order of a society or culture are used by all groups not only as a criterion of evaluation, but also

as a basis for the legitimation of their own interests or goals. For dominant groups, such ideological value-integration obviously will be used to legitimate their domination, and for dominated group to legitimate their opposition, dissidence or resistance (see Chapter 26). That is, the fundamental legitimacy of any ideological group presupposes that it remains part of the cultural moral order. Few racists openly defend inequality (see, however, Chapter 28), but will self-present themselves as emphasizing the relevance of nationalism and their own freedom (from being 'mixed' with others).

When seen by many others as flouting the principie of equality, thus, blatant racists are therefore usually marginalized. Hence the prominent role of denials of racism: whatever one may have against minorities, it will never be self-defined as racism. Thus, once a fundamental value (such as equality or democracy) is generally accepted in a society, such values can no longer be simply 'rejected' by groups without losing their credibility, respect or societal legitimacy.

The differential ideological incorporation of values by different groups also suggests that values, as cognitive representations, are not limited to non-ambiguous concepts. 'Freedom' thus means something rather different for a corporate manager than it does for a union representative. The same is true for most groups and most values, as complex 'big' values such as 'democracy' show. Theoretically, it would therefore probably be more adequate to speak of value-complexes. Thus the freedom-complex would feature, for example, the following components of the desirable goal described with the concept of 'freedom': (1) we can do what we want to do;

(2) nobody is limiting our actions, etc.

Values are not merely integrated into ideologies, but govern social beliefs more generally. Also group attitudes of specific social domains may use values as benchmarks for evaluation, justification and legitimation. For instance, one of the evaluative arguments used in the rejection of immigration is that the country is l'uñ . For rather fundamental social, cultural (and probably biological) reasons, 'overpopulation' (and, implicitly, ethnic mixing) are here used as negative values in the application of xenophobic ideologies to the domain of immigration.

Mental Models

From the social to the personal

One fundamental lack of afi traditional and contemporary approaches to the theory of ideology is that they do not account for the relation between the social and the personal in the accomplishment of social practices. We have seen that ideologies, like knowledge, attitudes and values are social representations, shared by the members of groups. At the same time, each serious theory of ideology needs to describe and explain how such social representations are constructed and used by individual group members in and by their social practices in general, and their discourse in particular.

We also know from both research and experience that these social practices of individuals are not always'in finé with group ideologies. Apart from the variable constraints of context, there are personal idiosyncrasies, different personal histories and different personal experiences, among many other factors that may affect the variable'expressioñ of ideologies in action by members as individuals. An empirical theory of ideology that would systematically describe and explain ideological practices also needs to account for such differences, variation, dissidence and contradictions. Though ideologies are shared with others, people make individual use of them, as they do with their knowledge of the language or the attitudes of their group or culture. Since also these personal and contextual uses and variation have general properties, they need to be part of a theory of ideology. In other words, such a theory must describe and explain also how ideologies are actually used or applied.

Such a theory at the same time explains the opposite process, namely, how ideologies are gradually acquired, developed and changed in and by situated social practices, and especially by discourse. Since social beliefs are not innate, we must assume that they are gradually acquired by social perception, interaction, and especially in communicative events. However, these specific events vary individually and contextually, so we have the problem of how a'unifled' group ideology may develop from such highly variable experiences and practices. Apparently, a process of normalization and unification is at work, that enables general, abstract beliefs to be shared by many or most members of groups, again much in the same way as natural languages are learned by language users interacting with each other in many different situations.

In the discussion of social representations in general, I have already suggested that besides the social and abstract account of such representations, we need to realize that although they are shared at the group level, this does not mean that all group members have identical'copies' of the representations. Rather, we must assume that because of obvious individual differences of 'ideological socializatioñ in the group, each member has her or bis own personal 'version' of the ideology. Obviously, this personal version must be close enough to the abstract group ideology for members to be able to function appropriately as competent group members. Again, comparison with the social and shared nature of grammars and individual knowledge of a language is instructive here.

It should be stressed that personal 'versions' of ideologies are still to be seen as social representations. In the memory theory used here this means that such personal versions of ideologies are part of social memory, and not of personal (episodic). memory. Despite the idiosyncratic nature of some of the features of this personal version of ideologies (mostly they will be less complete than the group-level ideology), their overall forro is general and abstract, and largely socially shared. In that respect they should be clearly distinguished from the individual uses of ideologies in specific contexts as a basis for individual social practices and discourse. It is this last aspect of the relation between ideology and its manifestation in social practices that is the topic of this chapter.

Mental models

Theoretically, therefore, what we need is an interface between socially shared representations and personal practices, that is, a theoretical device that enables us to connect social (semantic) memory with personal (episodic) memory and their respective representations. Since the early 1980s, cognitive psychology has with considerable .theoretical and empirical success developed such a theoretical construct, namely, that of a mental model.'

Mental models are representations in personal memory of events or, as the terco 'episodic memory' suggests, of episodes. Thus, when witnessing, participating in or hearing/reading about a car accident, people construct a model of such an event. Obviously, this model is subjective: it represents the personal experience and interpretation of the event by the participant. Thus, what people know personally about such an event, as well as their perspective on and opinion about the event, is represented in their subjective, individual models of the event. For discourse this means that the model is being constructed for the event the discourse is about.

In a theory of discourse production and comprehension, to which I shall turn later, the notion of a model is especially attractive, since it accounts for the (personal, subjective) interpretation of the discourse by language users. Indeed, we may now simply say that to understand a discourse ultimately (and via a number of complex processes) consists in the construction of a

80 Cognition

model. Conversely, in discourse production, the model is precisely the starting point for text and talk: it is the personal knowledge, experience or opinion about an event that is being used as 'input' to the discourse production processes. That is, models also account for the traditional notion of intention and plan. This means that because they are more or less independent with respect to discourse meanings, models also explain personal variation and biases of discourse or their interpretation. As we know intuitively, we may construct an interpretation of the text that may be partly at odds with the meaning of the text, or indeed with that of the intentions of the speaker or writer.

As suggested, models are essentially personal and subjective. They embody personal interpretations and experiences of actions, events and discourse about such episodes, and this is true for all social practices. This personal dimension may be the result of earlier experiences (old models that are being activated or updated) that constitute the personal history of each person, as well as other, more general or abstract personal representations (personality, personal opinions, and so on).

People are engaged in the ongoing interpretation of the episodes of their everyday lives from the moment they wake up until they fall asleep (or lose consciousness). Such interpretations should be seen as contextually relevant constructions of such episodes iii mental models stored in episodic memory.

These models also account for the familiar notion of an experience. That is, it is not the 'real' episodes themselves that play a role in our lives, but rather their personal interpretation or construction as models, that is the way episodes are experienced. We may therefore call this particular class of models experience models. It comes as no surprise that such experience models are built around the central category of self, which gives the orientation and the perspective to the model, and which defines the essentially subjective nature of experience models. This means that also representations of our future actions, that is, plan, are a type of experience models, although these will generally be less specific than the ways we represent actually %ved' experiences.

Besides the subjectivity of everyday understanding of our environment, experience models finally also account for the notion of consciousness. Being conscious means (among other things) that we are aware of ourselves as well as our environment, and are actively constructing interpretations of ourselves and that environment. 2

People do not only build models of episodes in which they are engaged themselves, but also models of those episodes they witness and especially those they hear and read about. In order to be able to distinguish them from episodic models about personal experiences, I shall here call them description models, in order to emphasize that we know the episodes through (discursive) description. Since we may also talk about our personal experiences, and typically do so in personal stories, the sets of experience and description models obviously overlap. Other episodes we only know about vicariously, that is through discourse, typically so for many of the episodes

reported in the mass media. As suggested aboye, description models (earlier called'situation models'), are needed as a basis for text production and comprehension. It is plausible, however, that description models are shaped after our experience models, because we tend to understand unfamiliar episodes in light of those we know personally.

As is the case for all models, also models of events talked or written about feature specifications of more general knowledge about such events. Thus, a model of an event during the civil war in Bosnia is not just built from the unique, specific and new information we get from the media, but also from an 'application' of general knowledge about civil wars, armies, killing, ethnic relations and Yugoslavia. It is in this way that social representations are 'concretized' in models, and social memory related to episodic memory and subjective representations. As we shall see later, such episodic models that interpret discourse, will be fundamental in relating ideologies to discourse structures.

To avoid terminological confusion, 1 shall henceforth use the term episodic model (or mental model or simply model) to denote any kind of model in episodic memory, that is, a subjective representation of an episode. As explained aboye, I use the term experience model (or simply'experience') for those episodic models that represent personal participation in or observation of episodes in our own lives. More generally the terco event model will be used to denote any kind of model that interprets events or situations (personal or otherwise) referred to by discourse. I also make this distinction here because the current psychological literature rather confusingly deals with different kinds of models, without explicitly distinguishing them, and because the various notions of model will be needed below in showing how ideology monitors social practices. Note finally that all models may represent both small actions and events (like eating an apple), compound or sequences of events (like meetings) as well as large and complex episodes such as vacations or civil wars. In other words, episodic memory consists of sets and systems of hierarchically organized models. Part of that system, that of our experience models, defines our autobiographical 'past'.

Event schemata

Although no general theoretical proposal has as yet been made about the structure of these models, we may assume that these structures must be able to manage effectively the interpretation of events, a process that people are engaged in many hundreds of times a day. This suggests that also here a handy schema might be at work, or a number of categories and roles or strategies to construct such pattems for each situation.

Such a schema is hardly obscure, and has been proposed in different guises, for instance in the theory of social episodes, 3 as well as in the functional semantics of propositions. Since people not only represent events in models, but also routinely talk about them, for example, in everyday stories, it is not surprising that the categories of these models somehow also

appear in grammatical and discursive structures: setting (location, time), circumstances, participants (and their various action roles: agent, patient, experiencer, object, etc.), and flnally an action or event. 4 Indeed, we may argue conversely, that once we have introduced the notion of model and its typical event (or action and situation) schemata, these schematic structures may be seen as the cognitive basis and explanation of discourse structures. In other words: the structures that organize the way events are understood will also influence the ways such events are talked about.

Context models

There is one particular type of event that has a crucial influence on discourse and its structures, namely, the communicative event or situation in which the current discourse is being produced and/or received. The mental models of such communicative events will be called context models. Since context models represent part of our personal experiences, namely, the one in which we are engaged when communicating, context models are merely a specific type of experience models. That is, also context models are personal, subjective and possibly biased, and hence represent the personally variable interpretations and opinions of communicative events. We routinely tel stories about them by later activating such context models.

Context models also have the same structure as experience models, namely, that of a setting (time, location), circumstances, participants and their various roles, and finally a communicative action (see Chapter 22 for details). Crucial in context models is the participant category of self as a speaker/writer or hearer/reader. It is Chis self-category that defines the subjectivity of discourse, monitors perspective and point of view, and organizes many other subjective features of text and talk. 5

Context models are also special because they act in turra as the interface between event models and discourse. They tell the speech participants who they are, as what they participate in this event, and a lot of other relevant information and opinions about the present social situation of talk or text. The pragmatic constraints that influence discourse meaning and form are represented in this context model, such as the conditions for speech acts (usually knowledge about what I and my interlocutor know, want or do), conditions of politeness (such as social status or power), institutional circumstances, group membership, mutual knowledge, opinions about each other, as well as the goals and intentions of the communicative event, and so on.

That is, instead of merely abstractly spelling out these many 'pragmatic' constraints of contexts, or vaguely referring to the role of context, we now have a rather concrete proposal for a more explicit cognitive representation of such contexts. At the sarne time, context models explain how our personal knowledge about people, actions, events or situations, as represented in event models, will be expressed in discourse as a function of the information