From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Mar 31 2003 - 22:46:47 MST
At 07:05 PM 3/31/03 -0800, Lee Corbin wrote:
>Hal Finney writes
>> It's mundane, but we can start with the definition
>> of "ideology" from dictionary.com:
>
>> 1. The body of ideas reflecting the social needs and aspirations of an
>> individual, group, class, or culture.
>> 2. A set of doctrines or beliefs that form the basis of a political,
>> economic, or other system.
>
>> In the crudest form, ideological blinders prevent someone from seeing and
>> thinking about facts which would contradict the ideology.
>The most important aspect to me is whether we can distinguish
>political ideologies---in their effects---from other systems
>of belief. For example, most of your analysis might equally
>well apply, it seems to me, to my convictions about
>certain scientific or historical matters.
One problem here is in discerning the limits of `political' as a framing
adjective. Feminist critique, for all its excesses, has shown convincingly
the ideological forces skewing, constraining, even largely *creating* the
ways most men and women in the Western 1950s, say, understood what it is to
be a male or a female human. This construction was largely invisible to
those involved; it was *just how the world is*. If you were a black man or
woman, you had further layers of ideological shaping simultaneously imposed
*on* you and internalized *inside* you. That's ideology: not what political
opinions you happen to find fashionable, but the immense social
constraining and enabling powers of discourse.
Of what?
Oh well, here's a bit from THE ARCHITECTURE OF BABEL. I probably posted
this last time around, but it might provide some chewy nuggets:
============
A discourse, in general terms, is a kind of local communication field which
arises in the unexplored linguistic gap between the realms of langue and
parole. Discourse, that is, has some of the characteristics of a language
system, as a competence at a high level of abstraction, which yet arises
out of the performative speech acts which mediate the day-to-day exercise
of power and knowledge. Perhaps each discourse, in as much as it can be
specified, is a slice through the polysemous jangle-jungle of conflicting
meanings which become attached (through conflicts, and the pressure of
novelties of every kind) to each human utterance or inscription.
Let us look briefly at some of the typical moves in that variety of
discourse theory which is an offshoot of Althusserian Marxism, as discussed
in a survey by Diane Macdonell (1986).
Typically enough, Macdonell's attempted redemption of Althusser ascribes
the relativist, constructivist commonplaces of discourse theory to what she
calls his `radical breakthrough' (p. 13). Suddenly, after the 1969 essay
`Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses', intellectuals in the French
Communist Party were urged to see that superstructural social phenomena
like families, religions and education (now `ISAs') might be as causally
significant as brute `relations of economic production'. Is it unfair of me
to belittle Althusser's discovery as a commonplace? Has not theory, under
his influence, opened our understanding of the self to unprecedented voids
of uncertainty? Not altogether unprecedented. Consider that much-debunked
falsificationist Karl Popper, on the topic of subjectivity:
"It seems to me of considerable importance that we are not born as
selves, but that we have to learn that we are selves; in fact we have to
learn to be selves....
"I suggest that a consciousness of self begins to develop through the
medium of other persons: just as we learn to see ourselves in a mirror, so
the child becomes conscious of himself by sensing his reflection in the
mirror of other people's consciousness of himself." (Popper and Eccles,
1977, pp. 109-10)
Popper's figure of the mirror is not a sly appropriation of one of theory's
favorite tropes. As he points out, it goes back at least to Adam Smith
(1759: The Theory of Moral Sentiments) who `puts forward the idea that
society is a "mirror" which enables the individual to see and to "think of
his own character, of the propriety or demerit of his own sentiments and
conduct, of the beauty or deformity of his own mind", which suggests that
if it were "possible that a human creature could grow up to manhood in some
solitary place, without any communication with his own species" then he
could not develop a self' (cited in Popper and Eccles, p. 111).
While not precisely gleaming with dark Lacanian opacity, this bourgeois
classic is not very far from the celebrated entry via Alice's Looking Glass
to the Symbolic Order, and Althusser's construction of subjecthood via the
process of `hailing' or `interpellation' by another.
The difference, of course, lies in the sustained Althusserian attack on any
`human nature' which might be considered necessary to underpin the
effectiveness of any process of interpellation. As Terry Eagleton says, it
is ineffective to baptize a badger (Eagleton, 1983, p. 118; he is
discussing Austin and illocutionary acts). In much the same way, it is also
ineffective to interpellate a chair, or even a computer (although often
enough I find myself doing so). Althusser, of course, was aware of this
flaw in his case and attempted to correct it by what seems to me
self-evidently a vacuous re-definition:
"[I]deology hails or interpellates individuals as subjects. As
ideology is eternal, I must now suppress the temporal form in which I have
presented the functioning of ideology, and say: ideology has always-already
interpellated individuals as subjects, which amounts to making it clear
that individuals are always-already interpellated by ideology as subjects,
which necessarily leads us to one last proposition: individuals are
always-already subjects." (Althusser, 1984, pp. 49-50)
The sole sense which can be made of this - Althusser says it `might seem
paradoxical' (p. 50), and he is right - is that individuals are genetically
predisposed to take the imprint of culture. We are `primed' to be
interpellated. Now as it happens (it could have been otherwise; we might
have been social insects) the kind of pre-formation this is lends itself to
the experience of inner consciousness, self-motivation, whether this be
valorized as `individual initiative' or stigmatized as `original sin',
`bourgeois illusion', or the clamor of Maya.
...the books mentioned, now all rather old:
Althusser, Louis (1984) Essays on Ideology, London: Verso
Eagleton, Terry (1983) Literary Theory: An Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell
[and see also Eagleton, Terry (1991) Ideology: An Introduction, London: Verso]
Macdonell, Diane (1986) Theories of Discourse: An Introduction, Oxford:
Blackwell
Popper, Karl and John Eccles (1977) The Self and its Brain: An Argument for
Interactionism, Berlin: Springer International
================
That's obviously not intended as a substantive reply to either Hal or Lee,
but as a hint of where one might need to look for further elaborated
discussions.
Damien Broderick
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