The Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA (original) (raw)
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Ideology: towards renewal of a critical concept
Media, Culture & Society
In this response to our critics and fellow-travellers we reaffirm our claim that contemporary media studies should reinvent a critical concept of ideology. We do this through addressing some of the problems with older critical conceptions of ideology and suggesting potentially fruitful ways forward through engaging with research traditions that have become neglected or are overlooked in the field. This avowedly inter-disciplinary position draws on political philosophy, critical realism, ordinary language philosophy, and discursive psychology. At the end of the essay we show how a critical concept of ideology can be applied in analysis of news reporting.
The notion of ideology is a fairly complex and controversial one. According to Williams (1976: 126), the word 'ideology' 'first appeared in English in 1796, as a direct translation of the new French word idéologie which had been proposed in that year by the rationalist philosopher Destutt de Tracy', to denote the 'science of ideas, in order to distinguish it from the ancient metaphysics'. In addition to this scientific sense, there is a more pejorative sense of the word in the philosophical tradition, originating from the 19th century and popularised by the writings of Marx & Engels (1976). For them, the ruling ideas of an epoch were 'nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships', and failure to realise this produced ideology as an upside-down version of reality. This is reflected in the notion of ideology as 'false consciousness'. There is also a more neutral sense of ideology in Marx' writings, ideology as a 'set of ideas which arise from a given set of material interests' (Williams, 1976: 129). This sense was elaborated by Lenin for whom ideology is the system of ideas that are appropriate to a social class, usually an economically defined class, identified by a qualifying adjective: proletarian ideology, bourgeois ideology, etc. More recent philosophers have focused on the implicit and unconscious materialisation of ideologies in practice. For example, Gramsci (1971: 328) defined ideology as 'a conception of the world that is implicitly manifest in art, in law, in economic activity and in the manifestations of individual and collective life'. Ideologies are, thus, 'tied to action, and [...] judged in terms of their social effects rather than their truth values' (Fairclough, 1995:76). Ideology is also often connected with power and domination, i.e. class power and domination, in the Marxist tradition, or linked to Gramsci's concept of hegemony (cf. Fairclough, 1995: 17).
Article Reflections on the concept of ideology
This article presents narratives and arguments around the theme of ideology, based on the human condition of language. Despite having already been investigated by many authors, which hinders any claim to originality, the theme is not capable of a definitive delimitation. The issue of ideology will be addressed in line with the interpretation of notable intellectuals, with an emphasis on the culture irradiated by the media. The script of the article, constituted from a bibliographic review and a critical and reflective approach, gathers digressions on the issue of Lyotard's meta-reports and Baudrillard's hyperreality.
Encyclopedia of Critical Political Science, 2024
A critical political science, if it is to be both critical and a science, must overcome what is often referred to as the "fact-value distinction"; a view that is traceable to David Hume (2007, 302), who argued it is impossible to derive critical conclusions-regarding what ought or ought not to be-from scientific premises, which concern what is, was, or perhaps will be. The approach to "ideology critique" outlined in this chapter bridges that gap by grounding claims about how the world ought to be in an account of how the world is and came to be that way.
Ideology and discourse analysis
Contrary to most traditional approaches, ideologies are defined here within a multidisciplinary framework that combines a social, cognitive and discursive component. As 'systems of ideas', ideologies are sociocognitively defined as shared representations of social groups, and more specifically as thè axiomatic ' principies of such representations. As the basis of a social group's selfimage, ideologies organize its identity, actions, aims, norms and values, and resources as well as its relations to other social groups. Ideologies are distinct from the sociocognitive basis of broader cultural communities, within which different ideological groups share fundamental beliefs such as their cultural knowledge. Ideologies are expressed and generally reproduced in the social practices of their members, and more particularly acquired, confirmed, changed and perpetuated through discourse. Although general properties of language and discourse are not, as such, ideologically marked, systematic discourse analysis offers powerful methods to study the structures and functions of underlying' ideologies. The ideological polarization between ingroups and outgroups-a prominent feature of the structure of ideologies-may also be systematically studied at all levels of text and talk, e.g. by analysing how members of ingroups typically emphasize their own good deeds and properties and the bad ones of the outgroup, and mitigate or deny their own bad ones and the good ones of the outgroup.
What Is Ideology? An Attempt at Reactualising a Category of Social Critique
For more than thirty years, the concept of ideology virtually disappeared from philosophical and sociological discourse. It is only recently that there have been attempts to reactivate this concept as a central category of political critique – as it was until the 1970s. In this text I start with an attempt to illuminate the reasons why the concept of ideology, which I believe can serve as a central conceptual tool for diagnosing and analysing the pathologies of the political, was forgotten for years. The main part of the text focuses on an attempt at an actualising reconstruction of this category: a reconstruction that should be capable of meeting the standards of conceptual analysis as defined primarily in modern analytic philosophy. This attempt is accompanied by a discussion of concrete examples of actual ideological constructions as well as by an analysis of their political functions and effects. In this discussion I focus on ideological constructions that have had a significant negative impact on the process of establishing liberal democracy in the former communist countries in Eastern Europe, and especially in Bulgaria.