Ideo Logy

defination

A complex term, but in (very) short, ideology refers to a belief system or worldview; a coherent structure of thinking which obscures incongruous elements in order to uphold a particular social order. It is a set of beliefs and goals of a social or political group that explain or justify the group's decisions and behavior. It is the knowledge or beliefs developed by human societies as part of their cultural adaptation. It isa more or less systematic set of ideas, values, and beliefs, which underlies the practices of a society, a class, or some other socially significant group of people.it is a body of beliefs, a doctrine, a socially grounded system for producing beliefs and values, a way of producing meanings or doctrines. It may be a set of beliefs and ideas that justify certain interestsAn ideological position reflects and rationalizes particular political, economic, institutional, and/or social interests. a form of social or political philosophy in which practical elements are as prominent as theoretical ones. It is a system of ideas that aspires both to explain the world and to change it. This article describes the nature, history, and significance of ideologies in terms of the philosophical, political, and international contexts in which they have arisen. For discussions of particular categories of ideology, see the articles socialism, communism, anarchism, fascism, nationalism, liberalism, and conservatism.

Meaning

Ideology: "Ideology" means to favor one point of view above all others and to adhere to this point of view. The ideologue sees the world from a single point of view, can thus "explain" it and attempt to "change" it. The photographer, on the other hand, has numerous, equally legitimate points of view at his disposal. His goal is not to "explain" the world but to "record" it from ever different points of view. We should not be deceived, however, by the photographer's freedom from ideology. The ideology is still present, no longer in the photographer but hidden in the camera. In lature Literally the study of ideas, the collective knowledge, understandings, opinions, values, preconceptions, experiences and/or memories that informs a culture and its individual people. Ideology is often aligned with political beliefs, but is much broader than that, relating to any social or cultural beliefs, and these beliefs are revealed in literary or other texts. In a text, certain ideas or values will be dominant, while others will be necessarily marginalized. For instance, on its most basic level, The Three Little Pigs reveals an ideology that values a strong home and good work ethic that lead to a stable existence, and the pigs can be read against this ideology.

David W. Minar describes six different ways in which the word "ideology" has been used: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

As a collection of certain ideas with certain kinds of content, usually normative; As the form or internal logical structure that ideas have within a set; By the role in which ideas play in human-social interaction; By the role that ideas play in the structure of an organization; As meaning, whose purpose is persuasion; and As the locus of social interaction, possibly.

For Willard A. Mullins, an ideology is composed of four basic characteristics: 1. 2. 3. 4.

it must have power over cognitions; it must be capable of guiding one's evaluations; it must provide guidance towards action; and, as stated above, must be logically coherent.

ORIGEN OF IDEOLOGY Origins and characteristics of ideology ness.

The word first made its appearance in French as idéologie at the time of the French Revolution, when it was introduced by a philosopher, A.-L.-C. Destutt de Tracy, as a short name for what he called his “science of ideas,” which he claimed to have adapted from the epistemology of the philosophers John Locke and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, for whom all human knowledge was knowledge of nlideas It was Bacon who had proclaimed that the destiny of science was not only to enlarge man's knowledge but also to “improve the life of men on earth,” and it was this same union of the programmatic with the intellectual that distinguished Destutt de Tracy's idéologie from those theories, systems, or philosophies that were essentially explanatory. The science of ideas was a science with a mission; it aimed at serving men, even saving them, by ridding their minds of prejudice and preparing them for the sovereignty of reason. some Starting from a critique of Althusser a theory of the generation (production) and reproduction of ideology is developed. In a primary process practice gives rise to spontaneous ideology. In a secondary pro cess of sedimentation and elaboration social forms and systematic ideologies act back on the primary process. Hegemonic ideology ex pressing ultimate values and Weltanschauung is related to class ideology, political and

religious ideology and to spontaneous forms of conscious causes .

Causes of ideology

LOUIS ALTHUSSER builds on the work of Jacques Lacan to understand the way ideology functions in society. He thus moves away from the earlier Marxist understanding of ideology. In the earlier model, ideology was believed to create what was termed "false consciousness," a false understanding of the way the world functioned (for example, the suppression of the fact that the products we purchase on the open market are, in fact, the result of the exploitation of laborers). Althusser explains that for Marx "Ideology is [...] thought as an imaginary construction whose status is exactly like the theoretical status of the dream among writers before Freud. For those writers, the dream was the purely imaginary, i.e. null, result of the 'day's residues'" (Lenin 108). Althusser, by contrast, approximates ideology to Lacan's understanding of "reality," the world we construct around us after our entrance into the symbolic order. (See the Lacan module on the structure of the psyche.) For Althusser, as for Lacan, it is impossible to access the "Real conditions of existence" due to our reliance on language; however, through a rigorous"scientific" approach to society, economics, and history, we can come close to perceiving if not those "Real conditions" at least the ways that we are inscribed in ideology by complex processes of recognition. Althusser's understanding of ideology has in turn influenced a number of important Marxist thinkers, including Chantalle Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Zizek, and Fredric Jameson. (See, for comparison, the Jameson module on ideology.) Althusser posits a series of hypotheses that he explores to clarify his understanding of ideology:

1) "Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence" (Lenin 109). The traditional way of thinking of ideology led Marxists to show how ideologies are false by pointing to the real world hidden by ideology (for example, the "real" economic base for ideology). According to Althusser, by contrast, ideology does not "reflect" the real world but "represents" the "imaginary relationship of individuals" to the real world; the thing ideology (mis)represents is itself already at one remove from the real. In this, Althusser follows the Lacanian understanding of the imaginary order, which is itself at one step removed from the Lacanian Real. In other words, we are always within ideology because of our reliance on language to establish our "reality"; different ideologies are but different representations of our social and imaginary "reality" not a representation of the Real itself.

2) "Ideology has a material existence" (Lenin 112). Althusser contends that ideology has a material existence because "an ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices" (Lenin 112). Ideology always manifests itself through actions, which are "inserted into practices" (Lenin 114), for example, rituals,

conventional behavior, and so on. Indeed, Althusser goes so far as to adopt Pascal's formula for belief: "Pascal says more or less: 'Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe'" (Lenin 114). It is our performance of our relation to others and to social institutions that continually instantiates us as subjects. Judith Butler's understanding of performativity could be said to be strongly influenced by this way of thinking about ideology.

3) "all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects" (Lenin 115). According to Althusser, the main purpose of ideology is in "'constituting' concrete individuals as subjects" (Lenin 116). So pervasive is ideology in its constitution of subjects that it forms our very reality and thus appears to us as "true" or "obvious." Althusser gives the example of the "hello" on a street: "the rituals of ideological recognition [...] guarantee for us that we are indeed concrete, individual, distinguishable and (naturally) irreplaceable subjects" (Lenin 117). Through "interpellation," individuals are turned into subjects (which are always ideological). Althusser's example is the hail from a police officer: "'Hey, you there!'" (Lenin 118): "Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject" (Lenin 118). The very fact that we do not recognize this interaction as ideological speaks to the power of ideology: what thus seems to take place outside ideology (to be precise, in the street), in reality takes place in ideology [....] That is why those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, "I am ideological." (Lenin 118)

4) "individuals are always-already subjects" (Lenin 119). Although he presents his example of interpellation in a temporal form (I am interpellated and thus I become a subject, I enter ideology), Althusser makes it clear that the "becoming-subject" happens even before we are born. "This proposition might seem paradoxical" (Lenin 119), Althusser admits; nevertheless, "That an individual is alwaysalready a subject, even before he is born, is [...] the plain reality, accessible to everyone and not a paradox at all" (Lenin 119). Even before the child is born, "it is certain in advance that it will bear its Father's Name, and will therefore have an identity and be irreplaceable. Before its birth, the child is therefore always-already a subject, appointed as a subject in and by the specific familial ideological configuration in which it is 'expected' once it has been conceived" (Lenin 119). Althusser thus once again invokes Lacan's ideas, in this case Lacan's understanding of the "Name-of-the-Father." Most subjects accept their ideological self-constitution as "reality" or "nature" and thus rarely run afoul of the repressive State apparatus, which is designed to punish anyone who rejects the dominant ideology. Hegemony is thus reliant less on such repressive State apparatuses as the police than it is on those Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) by which ideology is inculcated in all subjects. (See the next module for an

explanation of ISAs.) As Althusser puts it, "the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall submit freely to the commandments of the Subject, i.e. in order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection, i.e. in order that he shall make the gestures and actions of his subjection 'all by himself'" (Lenin 123).