ideology
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A draft of an encyclopedia entry written with undergraduates in mind:
Ideology
An ideology is a concept that refers to the collective beliefs, attitudes, and values of a given group of people, from social cliques and small communities to an audience or an entire nation. Although ideologies can be positive, most scholars who study or critique them focus on those that cause harm or suffering. For example, in Western societies the ideology of "individualism" is believed to be positive, while the ideology that promotes the idea men are superior to women, "sexism," is believed to be negative. Consequently, sexism is studied and critiqued more heavily than individualism, although both ideologies are operative in the United States. In general, it is believed that ideologies work largely unconsciously and tend to promote the status quo, usually by supporting those individuals who are in power. Although the concept derives from the materialist theories of Karl Marx, the use of ideology is not limited to materialist contexts. Today, the notion of "ideology" is widely assumed and referenced in a variety of communicative contexts.
Now commonly assumed in communication scholarship, Marx's main philosophical argument is that the way the world is materially arranged determines how we think about it. Until his philosophy, it was widely assumed that society as we know it is the product of human ingenuity: a group of individuals got together and dreamed-up the way society should look and function, and then went about making society in conformity with that dream. If this was truly the case, suggested Marx, then why hasn't utopian thinking brought about a better world? When Marx was working out his philosophy in the mid- to late nineteenth century, he witnessed an increasingly prosperous class of people (capitalists) exploiting poorer people for profit. Factories were inhumane and people---sometimes even children---worked long hours for a meager wage. Despite the increasing successes and growing wealth of the individuals who owned the factories, their workers were getting poorer, even dying. Observing how willingly the working class accepted their poor conditions, Marx concluded something was wrong; thought had become "inverted" or turned upside down from what it should be. Ideology was the concept that Marx developed to help explain how this inverted thought came about.
Although it is true that one must imagine and then create a blueprint for a building before it is built, Marx argued that the ideas behind the blueprint were actually influenced by material conditions including: (a) what resources were available for building; (b) who owned the resources for building; (c) what class of individuals was ruling society; and so on. Marx argued, in other words, that the building imagined by an architect and then subsequently built would reflect the way the world was materially arranged at the time, ultimately serving the interests of those in power (e.g., those who owned the resources and means for making things).
Analogously, Marx argued that state governments tend to support the material and political interests of a dominant group of people (the "ruling class"). For example, it is often taught in American schools that the "founding fathers" of the United States of America gathered together at the Philadelphia Convention in 1787 and invented the current government system, which is designed to serve "the people." A Marxist perspective, however, would emphasize that the government structure created at this convention only reinforced and stabilized the status quo: to this day, the government created by the founding fathers continues to support the most empowered in American society, which are wealthy white men. In sum, Marx reversed the way we think about thinking: it's not that we dream-up a better world and then create it; rather, it is that the material, concrete world pre-exists us, and that whatever we create will conform to the constraints of this preexisting, material world. This view is known as "materialism."
What, then, continues to maintain the existing material arrangement of society? Why do governments continue to support those in power? Even though technology is constantly changing our material and communicative interactions, why does it seem the same group of people always continues to benefit? In other words, despite obvious, dynamic change, why do political and state structures seem to stay the same? Marx's answer is "ideology." For him, ideology was fundamentally an inversion of the materialist view. If materialism is the idea that the concrete arrangement of the world influences how we think about it, then the ideology is the inverse notion that thought changes material reality. For Marx, then, ideology referred to something negative. Fundamentally, ideology referred to a kind of "inverted consciousness" that is incapable of seeing the fundamental contradictions of material reality that might lead to radical change. An individual under the sway of ideology, for example, believes that social class (e.g., rich and poor) is a natural arrangement and not the product of oppression and force. Because ideology is so powerful, argued Marx, only a violent, material disruption could change how we think about the world: revolution.
After Marx's death in 1883 the concept of ideology expanded to include new meanings, some of which were positive. Vladimir Lenin was most influential in shifting the negative connotation of ideology toward a more neutral connotation. If Marxism mounted a critique of the status quo and its commonly held beliefs, attitudes, and values as an inversion of material conditions, then such a critique must be coming from an alternative position with its own beliefs, attitudes, and values. In other words, Marxism is itself an ideology. Consequently, Lenin argued that ideology must be understood as the political consciousness of a given group of people, most especially that of an economic and social class. After Lenin, the concept of ideology became "neutral" when it was understood that the working class, whom Marxism champions, was ideologically opposed to the capitalist ideology of those in power, the wealthy ruling class.
After Lenin, the most influential thinker of ideology was Antonio Gramsci, who further expanded the concept to denote a set of representations or mental images of reality that is gleaned from a given culture's legal and economic systems, as well as art and other forms of community expression. For Gramsci, this concept of the world also included codes for social behavior and action. Consequently, if a given groups' ideology was pervasive, then they had "hegemony" or a tacit, largely unconscious control over social behaviors, forms of art, economics, and the law. If a group's ideology has hegemony, then their beliefs, attitudes, and values seem natural and like common sense. Like Lenin, Gramsci believed ideology was neutral and governed the political consciousness of a given group, however, he argued a group's ideology only achieves hegemony over others through contest and struggle. Gramsci argued, however, that hegemony is increasingly achieved without direct force or coercion, and often with unwitting the help of intellectuals.
Perhaps the most recent and influential thinker on ideology today is Louis Althusser, a French Marxist thinker who Jorge Larrain has argued sought to reconcile the negative and neutral understandings of ideology. Although Althusser would agree with Gramsci that ideology is struggled over, he expanded the concept further by adding a psychological dimension: ideology concerns the imagined relationship that individuals harbor about their real, material conditions. In other words, ideology concerns how a given person thinks about his or her relationship to the "real world." Althusser argues that we have to understand ideology as a kind of necessary illusion, which we borrow from the world outside to make sense of our identity and purpose in life. No one of us, suggests Althusser, has direct access the real, material world; our relationship to the world is filtered through and by representations (at the very least, by language itself). Ideology is the main source of those representations. Consequently, some of us grow up and reckon with our real conditions of existence as Chinese citizens, while others of us contend with material reality as evangelical Baptists from the Southern United States. In this respect, for Althusser ideology is unavoidable and necessary because is the very basis of identity itself.
Althusser's contribution to the concept of ideology cannot be underestimated, for it underlies a relatively recent theoretical movement, "post-Marxism," that has had a strong impact on communication theory. For Althusser, one needs to incorporate an ideology to become a self-conscious person. If I am a Marxist, for example, then I know material conditions directly influence what is thinkable, that my purpose in life is to uphold the ideology of the working class, and so on. If I am a Christian, then I know material reality is but an illusion of a greater, spiritual reality, that Jesus will return to earth again, and so on. In either case, ideology gives me a sense of who I am and what my relationship to the "real world" is about. Absent ideology, I cannot "know" who I am. Hence, every communicative encounter with another person is in some sense an ideological negotiation.
Another important element of Althusser's understanding of ideology is that it is diffuse and dynamic. For an individual to assume a set of beliefs, attitudes, and values about, say, the importance of capitalism, he or she must be confronted by them in multiple venues. A given ideology is not promoted by one person or even a class of persons, but rather by multiple agencies working simultaneously and in concert: the mass media; the educational system; economic and legal structures; the family; and so on. For example, let us use the ideology of individualism, which consists in the belief, attitude, and value that every person is unique and should take personal responsibility for his or her destiny.
One is not born to value individuality, but learns it through multiple agencies over a long period of time. As a youngster one is told about one's unique and special character by one's parents; the family teaches individualism. At the church, synagogue, or mosque one is taught that Deity has a unique plan for her life; religion teaches individualism. On television, talk show hosts tout the virtues of individual achievement and personal responsibility; the media teaches individualism. At school, one is given her own desk, told to bring her own materials to class, and is cautioned that she should keep her eyes on her own paper, because one's grade is determined by singular, individual effort; school teaches individualism. In this way, different agencies—the family, the media, the education system—work to instill and reinforce the ideology of individualism. Borrowing a concept from psychoanalysis, Althusser terms the way in which multiple sources perpetuate a given ideology "overdetermination."
Since Althusser's attempt at compromise, the concept of ideology has been freed of its Marxist origins. Absent the materialist tie, the concept of ideology differs from one context to the next. In the popular media, ideology is frequently used as a synonym for one's political orientation. In academic work, however, the concept of ideology is associated with scholars who conduct criticism or critique culture (e.g., the mass media). Generally, it remains the case that those who study ideology are interested, as Terry Eagleton has remarked, "in the ways in which people may come to invest in their own unhappiness." Although some ideologies---for example, the Christian ideology of loving one's enemy---can promote good things, in general scholars are interested in the ways in which ideology can harm and oppress people, and often without their noticing it.
Owing to the psychological turn of Althusser and the more popular work of mass movement scholars such as Eric Hoffer, however, in the last half-century ideology has taken on the connotations of political brainwashing. Unwilling to believe that individuals are "dupes" of ideology, many scholars abandoned the concept. Coupled with what is sometimes termed the "poststructural turn" in theoretical debates of the late twentieth century, this negative connotation has also led some scholars to call for abandoning the concept because it is self-defeating. In a charge that recalls Lenin's reworking of Marx's negative conception, some critics argue that ideology critique presumes a privileged vantage external to ideology for the critique to be possible. Such a presumption is, in fact, ideological itself and, consequently, any claim to discern hidden or obscured contradictions is itself as an ideological ruse. Instead, critics of ideology have argued for abandoning the concept in favor of Michel Foucault's conception of "discourse" or "power/knowledge." Contemporary defenders of ideology and ideological critique frequently counter by returning to Lenin or Gramsci's more complicated notions of ideology as reflecting a deeper, material contradiction or antagonism, or by arguing that the abandonment of ideology critique is motivated by an investment in the status quo.
More recently, Slavoj Zizek has defended the utility of ideology for scholarship by offering a Leninist re-reading of the concept. He suggests that an ideology can only be known in contrast to a competing ideology. Insofar as ideology denotes the collective beliefs, attitudes, and values of a given group of people, one cannot become conscious of another set of beliefs, values, and attitudes unless there is a conflict between the sets. Consequently, ideology critique is not self-defeating, but rather self-interested.
In the field of Communication Studies, ideology is most frequently encountered as a category in rhetorical criticism and organizational communication studies. For rhetorical scholars, "ideological criticism" is a form of scholarship in which "texts" are closely scrutinized in order to uncover the hidden beliefs, attitudes, and values promoted by and/or influencing them. One popular method among rhetoricians for studying ideology across different texts is known as "ideographic criticism." This method traces a singular term, or an "ideograph," across multiple texts, which is itself symptomatic of a much larger, external set of beliefs, attitudes and values. In organizational communication studies, ideology has been studied among organizations in order to show how one becomes dominant or hegemonic, influencing organizational cultures. Finally, symbolic convergence theory straddles both social scientific and rhetorical approaches to communication by tracking ideology in terms of "fantasy themes" or "visions" that are created and exchanged among small groups of people working toward a common goal.
See also
Critical Organizational Communication, Critical Rhetoric, Cultural Studies, Ideological Rhetoric, Marxist Theory, Materiality of Discourse, Rhetorical Theory, Symbolic Convergence Theory
Further Readings
Althusser, L. (1971). Lenin and philosophy and other essays (G. Brewster, Trans.). New York: Oxford University Press.
Bormann, E.G. (2001). The force of fantasy: Restoring the American dream (2nd ed.). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Eagleton, Terry. (1991). Ideology: An introduction. New York: Verso.
Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks. (Q. Hoare & G. N. Smith, Trans. & Eds.). New York: International Publishers.
Gunn, J. & Treat, S. (2005). Zombie trouble: A propaedeutic on ideological subjectification and the unconscious. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 91, 144-174.
Hoffer, Eric. (1951). The true believer: Thoughts on the nature of mass movements. New York: Harper & Row.
Larrain, J. (1979). The concept of ideology. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Larrain, J. (1983). Marxism and Ideology. London: Macmillan.
McGee, M.C. (1980). 'The ideograph': A link between rhetoric and ideology. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 66, 1-16.
Mumby, D.K. (1988). Communication and power in organizations: Discourse, ideology, domination. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Sholle, D.J. (1998). Critical studies: From the theory of ideology to power/knowledge. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 5, 16-41.
Wander, P. (1983). The ideological turn in modern criticism. Central States Speech Journal, 34, 1-18.
Zizek, S. (1995). "Introduction." In S. Zizek (Ed.), Mapping Ideology (pp. 1-33). New York: Verso.