The Uses and Utility of Ideology: Some R-Eflections

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The Uses and Utility of Ideology: Some R-Eflections Pragmatics2:3.3 I 1-323 InternationalPragmatics Association THE USES AND UTILITY OF IDEOLOGY: SOME R-EFLECTIONS Michael Silverstein Quelquegrands que soient les avantages dessignes, il fautconvenir qu'ils ont des inconvdniens;et si nous leur devons presquetous les progrds de notre intelli- gence,je lescrois aussi la causede pres- quetous ses 6carts. A. Destuude Tiacy (1827[1801]:267) Withoutwishing to commit the etymologicalfallacy in the understandingof a word's meaning,I would like first to comment on the traditions of usage of the term ideoloqv,a theme elegantly announced in Woolard's introductory discussion of "issuesand approaches." As is well known, it was Antoine Louis Claude Comte Destutt de Tiacy (1754-1836)who invented the term, in that naturalizing move of the French Enlightenmentrendition of l,ocke (or, to be sure, Condillocke) that sought to understandhuman "nature." Ideology was proposed as that special branch of zoologythat recognizesthe condition of humans,we animalswho have ideas as the contentof what we should call our minds. Central here is the fact that any ideas moredeveloped than physiologicalsensations are dependenton such ideas'being clothedin signs,the organization of which by some systematicgrammar allows the discursiveexpression of a logical faculty of mind. Hence, for Destutt de Tiacy, there is the generalscientific field of ideologyproper, the scienceof ideas,of which the subfieldof grammar studiesthe signiffing externalizations,as it were, in structured systemsof articulated signs, and the subfield of logic the modes of rationality orientedto truth and certitude of inferential statesof mind (i.e., formation and combinatoricsof ideas).Such a sciencewould, for its propounder,also allow us to diagnoseand understand "the causesof incertitude and flogical] error," thus presumablyleading to an ameliorationof the human conditionvis-d-vis its natural mentalfaculties. It is particularlyinteresting, therefore, to see the fate of this term, proposed as a formation parallel to any of the other "-ologies"of a systematicscientific outlook. It has obviously become a word that now denotes a part or aspect of Destuttde Tiacy's very object of investigation,and in many appearanceshas the specifically"pejorative" use - to pick up on JaneHill's invocationof RaymondGeuss (1981:12-22) - that presupposeswe know certainideas to be dubious,in error, and & 3I2 MichaelSilverstein therefore suspector at least suspicious,in the manner of "mere" ideas as opposed to material, historical,indeed factual "realities."l For those of us who have no connotational- i.e., ideological! - problems with consideringmental phenomenaas historical and factual, if not directly material realities,the concept of ideologyin our contemporaneoususage can embrace the terminologicaltransition to a notion of a concreteobject of possiblestudy, while making no judgment - at least in scientific and scholarly usage - about some independent and absolute universe of Tiuth (with its capital T) and Validity (positivistically,not positively,speaking) against which ideologiesare measured. (In this usage,it is no causefor concernthat scientificand scholarlydiscourse, too, is "ideological,"not escapingfrom the universeof human mental activitiesas these arise in conditionsof sociality.)It is thus with the sociologicaland anthropological (or more generally"descriptive" [Geuss 1981: 4-12]and socialscientific) concepts of ideologythat I should like to seeus continueto be concerned,and certainlythis cluster of concepts- to re-term Woolard'sdifferentiation of 'features'of the term ideolory - is central to all of the papersin the accompanyingsection, to which my remarks are directed. These different emphasesof socialscientific users of the concept-cluster- whether by name or equivalent- form a kind of palimpsestor geologicalstratifica- tion of connotationstaken from canonicalnineteenth- and twentieth-centurytexts. Ideologyis an intensionalcharacteristic, predicable of a society,of a group or other social formation abstractedfrom society,or even of individualswithin some defined population, and can be understoodas "mental,"therefore, with the sameproblems I Th" historicallinguist in me wishesto note that thereis an interestingproblem here in the shift of meaningfrom the abstractfield-of-scientific-study sense to the concretesense of (in the singular) one of the objects-of-scientific-study.It would seem likely that the actual mechanism involved a derived, adjectival usage,viz., iddoloqique,ideological, which would construe the objects-of-studyby characterizingthem as such objects,namely, those studied by the field of ideology.Thence it is easyto seethe back-formationthat reidentifiesthe baseas the object-of-study, sincethe -ique,-al formationsof adjectiveshave moved decisively in the directionof characterizing objectson the basisof their own denotingterms, especially as theseshare formally identical stems. It is clear that contemporaneouslywith Destutt de Thacy'sintroduction of the term iddoloeiein Paris,there was stimulatedtranslation coinage of an equivalentin English,attestations from 1796 and 1797appearing (reporting on the Frenchdiscussion) with the authorially-stipulatedsenses for ideolosv and ideoloeical (see O.E.D., s.w.). Apparently through a kind of delocutionary quotation-translationof (pro-)Napoleonicusage ca. 1813-1815,the derivationalset ideoloKv, ideoloque,ideologist, ideological emerges with a fiercelynegative and mockingconnotation, leading to a senseof unpractical,speculative, idealist social philosophical thoughts and thinkers,whence by the 1830sand 1840s,the oppositionof (negativelyvalued) ideas vs. historicaland materialfacts is establishedin English,especially ideas associable - according to one 1827citation of ideolory - "with hot-brainedboys and crazedenthusiasts," that is, the negatively-valued(mere) social-theoretic ideas of a group clearlyindexed as not that of the speakeror writer. Thus any ideologist,i.e., proponent of the intendedlyscientific field of ideolop, hasmerely ideological beliefs, as opposedto ideasthat correspondto material,historical, and factual realities. A possibleparallel shift in the noun-adjective derivationalstructure may be observablein very contemporarytimes, in English close to home, 'of wherewe can note the shift of the erstwhileparadigms (noun) languase - (adj.)linguistic [= language'lvs. (noun) linguistics- (adj.phr.) of linquistics,as in the noun phraselinsuistic theory, so that now the last phraseseems to speakers(linguists themselves!) to mean'theory (asopposed to descriptiveor other practice)of linguistics',not'...of langtage',and hencewinds up being an "ideologicalnterm - in the newersense - of its disciplinarysocial organization. Theuses and utility of ideologt 3I3 as the conceptsof 'culture' or 'language'when these are consideredas "mental" characteristics.Thus note that the sharednessof ideology,like that of culture ot language,and the relationship of ideology to consciousness,are properties that survivefrom Destutt de Tiacy's usage,which focusedupon the human condition as ideational.Certainly, the culture concept and the concept of languagecentral to severaltraditions of anthropologyand of linguisticshave entailed their wrestling with the natureof suchsharedness, and the degreesof consciousnessinvolved in such culturaland linguistic phenomena, in many different ways. These constitute both ontologicaland epistemologicalproblems for validity claims in the scientific manner for our statementsabout "the" culture or "the" languagewe purport to describe,as everyaware practitioner knows,and they will not disappear,as is increasinglybeing recognized(sometimes more forcefully by external critics than by practitioners,who then look like "ideological" apologists) by appeals to Cartesian certitude of self-examining"intuition." Having such intuitions, and being able consciously to formulateand communicate("share" in an active, agentive sense)them, may thus be "ideological"to a degree greater than, and in ways more diverse than, many studentsof culture and language in one scientistic mode or another would find tractable.Indeed, if all culturaland linguisticphenomena are essentiallyideological "allthe way down,"this calls for a re-evaluationof how we might creep up on such "material"or "objective"factuality as presentsitself in them. Observehow this leads into the secondaspect of the concept-cluster,the social-situatednessof ideology. For if we are dealing with some ideational phenomenonparticular to or predicableof societies,groups, etc., like the classic Romanticnotion of the world-view of "a people," "a nation," etc. that constitutes their uniqueness,then insofar as ideology is characteristic of any sociocultural phenomenon,it must inhere in what makes any social entity of whatever scope cohereas that socialentity. We have only to be able to locate such a social entity, to find the potential for a unique mental or ideological aspect associablewith its membersor participants.Once we yield to the distrustof the socially-locatable(as opposedto the material and factual of early nineteenth-centurypejorative usage) assomehow less factual than real facts, we see that the locatednessof ideology takeson a kind of negativeconnotation as opposedto the locatednessof "culture," in bothits technicaland its lay usages.Rather than seeingthat there is no such thingas a socialfact without its ideologicalaspect or component,many usersof the concepthave simplyyielded to the negativeconnotations of a kind of charged politicalrhetoric
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