Review Article: The Things We Do with Words – Contemporary Approaches to the Analysis of Ideology

British Journal of Political Science

Volumn 30, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 313-346

  Norval, Aletta J ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84937328279     PISSN: 00071234     EISSN: 14692112     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/s0007123400000144     Document Type: Article

References (90)

1. Raymond Williams, ‘Culture is Ordinary’, in Ann Gray and Jim McGuigan, eds, Studying Culture (London: Edward Arnold, 1993, 1st edn 1958), pp. 5-14 at p. 6.
2. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, edited by Colin Gordon (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester, 1980), p. 114.
3. For contemporary writers, such as Richard Rorty, this means that we must recognize that we live in a post-philosophical culture in which the most central question is whether we can take the ubiquity of language seriously, and whether we can ‘see ourselves as never encountering reality except under a chosen description-as…making worlds rather than finding them?’ Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), p. xxxix (emphasis in the original). This view stands in contrast to the views of theorists such as Habermas, for whom post-metaphysical thinking entails a concept of linguistically embodied reason which preserves from the metaphysical tradition the idea of the rational understanding of reality. Cf. William Rehg, ‘Translator's Introduction’, in Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), ix-xxxvii, esp. pp. xii-xiv.
4. Terence Ball, ‘Hobbes’ Linguistic Turn’, Polity, 17 (1985), 739-60, p. 740.
5. For a fuller discussion of this argument, see Fred Dallmayr, Language and Politics (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), esp. pp. 1-27. Dallmayr notes that the prominence of language in contemporary philosophical discussions leaves room for a great variety of emphases and approaches, both favourable and unfavourable. Indeed, he argues that the ‘turn to language is fragmented into a plethora of perspectives whose premises and objectives appear not only diverse but entirely incompatible’ (Dallmayr, Language and Politics, p. 19). For an in-depth discussion of two such contemporary perspectives on the linguistic turn from the standpoint of critical theory, see James Bohman, ‘Two Versions of the Linguistic Turn: Habermas and Poststructuralism’, in Maurizio Passerin D'Entre’ves and Seyla Benhabib, eds, Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), pp. 197-220. While these divergences no doubt are important, it is possible to locate certain shared concerns amongst otherwise divergent approaches. Most notable, in this respect, is the critique of a ‘philosophy of consciousness’.
6. The earliest works in this respect were published in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. It was only during the 1980s that these ideas penetrated the field more generally. Some of the main writings associated with the linguistic turn in political theory include: William E. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse, 2nd edn (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1983); Dallmayr, Language and Politics; John Dunn, ‘The Identity of the History of Ideas’, Philosophy, 63 (1968), 85-104; Hannah Fenichel Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), and Wittgenstein and Justice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971); Michael J. Shapiro, Language and Political Understanding (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); James Tully, ed., Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988); and James Tully, Strange Multiplicity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
7. One of the earliest texts which have tried to explore the consequences of developments in semiotics for the study of ideology and subject formation is Rosalind Coward and John Ellis's Language and Materialism (Boston, Mass: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977).
8. These assumptions were, of course, most evident in traditional Marxist accounts of ideology. For a detailed discussion of these issues, see Michelle Barrett, The Politics of Truth (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), Part 1.
9. Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man (London: Heineman, 1960); Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (New York: Free Press, 1960).
10. Technically this process of reinscription is one of ‘iteration’. Derrida introduced the idea of iteration in his discussion of speech act theory. See Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc. abc, edited by Gerald Graff (Evanston, III.: Northwestern University Press, 1988). For a detailed discussion of the infrastructure of iterability, see Rudolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 212-17.
11. The term ‘decontestation’ is drawn from Michael Freeden's morphological approach to the analysis of ideologies. Freeden argues that ideologies, in attempting to cement the word-concept relation, aim to ‘decontest’ the meanings of political concepts. That is, they aim to limit the range of possible contestation around central political concepts. Indeed, he regards ideologies as ‘groupings of decontested political concepts’ (Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, p. 82.) My use of the term ‘decontestation’ is wider. While including the emphasis on political concepts, I will argue that political ideologies do more than decontest clusters of political concepts. They also try to limit contestation of our political identifications.
12. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, p. 12.
13. David McLellan, Ideology (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995), p. 72.
14. Morrice, Philosophy, Science and Ideology, p. x, and p. 23.
15. Morrice, Philosophy, Science and Ideology, p. 24.
16. Morrice, Philosophy, Science and Ideology, p. 234.
17. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, p. 7.
18. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, p. 131.
19. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, p. 6.
20. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, pp. 13-14.
21. See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock Publications, 1974).
22. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, p. 38. As is apparent from this quote, Pocock was particularly influenced by Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd enlarged edn. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). The idea of a Kuhnian paradigm allowed him to draw out similarities and differences between scientific and political languages and communities. See, for instance, Pocock, Politics Language and Time, pp. 13-41.
23. See Quentin Skinner's brief account of this in his Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 101-8, as well as James Tully's introduction to a collection of Skinner's articles: James Tully, ‘The Pen Is a Mighty Sword: Quentin Skinner's Analysis of Politics’, in Tully, Meaning and Context, pp. 7-25.
24. Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism, p. 105.
25. These writers were also influenced by the works of a range of other scholars, including Thomas Kuhn, R. G. Collingwood, W. B. Gallie and A. Danto.
26. Skinner first utilized the idea of an ‘illocutionary force’ in his seminal article published in 1971. An illocutionary act refers to a case where a speaker does something in saying something, and not just as a consequence of what is said. See Quentin Skinner, ‘On Performing and Explaining Linguistic Actions’, Philosophical Quarterly, 21 (1971), 1-21.
27. Quentin Skinner, Machiavelli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Past Masters Series, 1981).
28. Tully, ‘The Pen Is a Mighty Sword’, p. 9.
29. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, p. 104. For Pocock these tasks correspond to that of the historian and the political scientist respectively.
30. Tully, ‘The Pen Is a Mighty Sword’, p. 13.
31. Developments in Continental philosophy over the last three decades provides us with the second intellectual horizon which has been crucial in shaping the contours of contemporary approaches to the question of ideology. The question of language, representation and its relation to our world also features prominently in the French post-structuralist tradition. While approached from a different vantage-point than that developed in the Anglo-Saxon world, surprisingly many areas of overlapping concern could be delineated. These approaches also developed in response to dissatisfaction with ahistorical structuralist and overly metaphysical accounts of language and its relation to the world. Of these, the most important are Foucault's archaeological and genealogical methods, and deconstuction, even though the latter cannot, strictly speaking, be classified as a method. For a brief discussion of similarities in approach between Skinner and Foucault, see Tully, ‘The Pen Is a Mighty Sword’, pp. 16-25. Several other texts have also been published over the past decade that attempt to trace out connections between the British tradition of ‘ordinary language analysis’ and continental post-structuralist approaches to language. In this respect, see for instance: Henry Staten, Wittgenstein and Derrida (London: University of Nebraska Press, 1984); and Stanley Cavell, Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).
32. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), p. 349. See also N. Helsloot, ‘Linguists of All Countries … On Gramsci's Premise of Coherence’, Journal of Pragmatics, 13 (1989), 547-66.
33. John Rajchman, Truth and Eros: Foucault, Lacan and the Question of Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 100.
34. Gilbert D. Chaitin, Rhetoric and Culture in Lacan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 4.
35. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, p. 3.
36. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, pp. 2-3.
37. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, p. 5.
38. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, p. 76.
39. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, p. 76. Freeden provides a detailed discussion and critique of the idea of ‘essential contestability’ as first articulated by Gallie. See Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, pp. 55-60.
40. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, p. 61.
41. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, p. 54.
42. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, p. 54.
43. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, p. 24.
44. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, p. 24.
45. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, p. 67. This, again, can be seen as a counter to the abstractionism inherent in much of contemporary political philosophy.
46. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, p. 62.
47. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, p. 63.
48. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, p. 65
49. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, p. 66. This view is markedly similar to that developed in Hans Blumenberg's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (London: MIT Press, 1985) in respect to his analysis of the central ideas of modernity. Blumenberg argues that we moderns have ‘inherited’ questions from earlier ages that have lost their specificity. Nevertheless, we still feel obliged to respond to them. Thus, modern ideas come to ‘reoccupy’ earlier positions, leading Blumenberg to assert that ‘totally heterogenous contents [can] take on identical functions in specific positions in the system of man's interpretation of the world and of himself’ (Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, p. 64).
50. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, p. 66.
51. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, p. 69.
52. Freeden distinguishes further between two sorts of cultural adjacencies: those operating within the framework of logical adjacency and elements that do not follow logically but are regarded in ordinary usage as indispensable (Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, pp. 70-1).
53. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, p. 72.
54. The concept of suture is taken from psychoanalysis. Laclau and Mouffe argue that hegemonic practices are ‘suturing’ practices, in so far as they try to ‘fill’ an original lack. See Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, n. 1, p. 88.
55. Ernesto Laclau, ‘Introduction’, in Ernesto Laclau (ed.), The Making of Political Identities (London: Verso, 1994), p. 3.
56. The term ‘articulation’ can to be understood by contrasting it to the Hegelian conception of ‘mediation’ and to the Marxist emphasis on a necessary relation between class and ideological position. Thus, articulation does not refer to an internal movement of the concept, and neither does it refer to a relation of necessity. Articulation is a political practice of linking together elements of an ideological formation (be they subject positions or political concepts) which have no necessary connection (Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, pp. 105-14).
57. Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, edited and introduced by John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986), pp. 202-3.
58. Lefort, Political Forms of Modern Society, p. 201.
59. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, pp. 105-11.
60. For critical overviews of their work, see Fred R. Dallmayr, ‘Hegemony and Democracy: On Laclau and Mouffe’, Strategies, 1 (1988), 29-49; and David Howarth, ‘Discourse Theory and Political Analysis’, in E. Scarborough and E. Tannenbaum, eds, Research Strategies in the Social Sciences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 268-93.
61. Laclau and Mouffe also utilize these insights in order to develop their concept of radical democracy. For a critical reading of the relation between their general theoretical stance and their conception of radical democracy, see William E. Connolly, ‘Review Essay: Twilight of the Idols’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 21 (1995), 127-37.
62. Laclau, New Reflections, p. 61.
63. See especially, Laclau, ‘Death and Resurrection'; and Laclau, ‘Empty Signifiers’.
64. Laclau, ‘Death and Resurrection’, p. 212.
65. Laclau, ‘Death and Resurrection’, p. 219.
66. Laclau, ‘Empty Signifiers’, p. 44.
67. This account of the ‘impossibility of society’ relies upon a more general account of the impossibility of the full constitution of any identity, and is drawn from both the psychoanalytic and deconstructive traditions. Derrida's deconstructive reading of the concept of ‘structure’ has been particularly influential in this respect for the development of Laclau and Mouffe's arguments. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 278-93.
68. Laclau, ‘Death and Resurrection’, p. 219.
69. Laclau, ‘Empty Signifiers’, p. 39. Signifying nothing, and signifying the ‘pure being’ of the system, ultimately amounts to the same thing.
70. The main limitation of this formulation is that it simply throws the analysis back on an undifferentiated idea of ‘context’. In order to facilitate analysis of ideologies, this needs to be supplemented, at the very least, by a Foucaultian conception of genealogy, and by the development of meso-level concepts. Paul Smith argues, along similar lines, that this problem raises the wider question of the relationship between a theory of indeterminacy and the work of historical specificity (Paul Smith, ‘Laclau's and Mouffe's Secret Agent’, in Miami Theory Collective (ed.), Community at Loose Ends (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 99-110, at p. 106).
71. Laclau, ‘Death and Resurrection’, p. 206.
72. Wilhelm Reich, quoted in Rosen, On Voluntary Servitude, p. 1.
73. Rosen, On Voluntary Servitude, p. 2.
74. Rosen, On Voluntary Servitude, p. 7. Rosen's work is informed by a clear-cut but problematic distinction between ideology and coercion. I would argue that in so far as ideology interpellates subjects, its operation clearly contains a dimension of coercion.
75. Austin draws attention to the illocutionary force, or point, of utterances. See Austin, How to Do Things with Words, edited by J.O. Urmson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965).
76. Rosen, On Voluntary Servitude, p. 99-100.
77. Rosen, On Voluntary Servitude, p. 167.
78. As a result of this emphasis on individual action, a recent commentator on On Voluntary Servitude has characterized Rosen as ‘a good man fallen among individualists’. See Alex Callinicos, ‘A Good Man Fallen Among Individualists’, Radical Philosophy, 85 (1997), 36-8. This shift to individualism could be attributed to the dichotomy Rosen sets up between structuralist and neo-Hegelian positions. Since he lacks the appropriate theoretical tools, he cannot envisage a theory that does account for collective action but which is non-individualistic. This possibility is opened up by post-Marxist accounts of subjectivity. A post-Marxist analysis will also be able to address one of the other problems with Rosen's alternative account. His emphasis on both instrumental and non-instrumental action fails to account for the role of failures of imaginary horizons. Any account of the emergence of new horizons of intelligibility (myths) must also take cognisance of the failures of old horizons, and the central role the formation of political identities played in such processes. Finally, Freeden's insights into the cultural limits set upon the development by political ideologies could be used to account for the fact that one rather than another new myth emerges in a specific context.
79. Rosen, On Voluntary Servitude, p. 262.
80. It is remarkable that Rosen never once questions the idea of interests as objectively given. In fact, his analysis simply assumes that agents have interests, and that they are given in an unproblematic fashion. From a post-Marxist perspective, it would be necessary to investigate the historico-political processes in and through which interests come to be constituted, and become decontested, appearing as natural. For a genealogy of the idea of interests, see Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), esp. Part 1.
81. Rosen, On Voluntary Servitude, p. 272. In particular, Rosen argues that we need to account for the rise of scientism since the decline of Providentialism. Providentialism was a model that satisfied a series of explanatory needs in ways that were thought to be consonant with the developing sciences of the time. With the decline of Providentialism, the character of non-rational belief about society changed significantly. The nineteenth century saw the displacement of Providentialist justifications of social inequality by biological ones (such as Social Darwinism).
82. Lefort, Political Forms of Modern Society, pp. 181-236.
83. The real is one of the three orders according to which all psychoanalytic phenomena may be described, the other two being the symbolic and imaginary orders. Evans argues that a constant theme in Lacan's work from 1953 onwards focuses on the character of the real as unassimilable to symbolization. For a discussion of the different nuances of the term ‘real’ in Lacanian psychoanalysis, see Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 159-61.
84. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, p. 276.
85. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, p. 276.
86. This is a result of the particular intellectual trajectory of post-Marxist approaches, and the manner in which it has tended to develop its anti-essentialist critique. For a full discussion of this issue, see Aletta J. Norval, ‘Frontiers in Question’, Acta Philosophica, 18 (1997), 51-75, pp. 53-61.
87. Laclau, ‘Empty Signifiers’, p. 41.
88. Elizabeth J. Bellamy, ‘Discourses of Impossibility: Can Psychoanalysis be Political?’ Diacritics, 23 (1993), 24-38, pp. 33-4.
89. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, p. 135.
90. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, p. 1.