What is ideology?

What is ideology?

Ideology generally refers to a systematic ideological concept formed on a certain social and economic basis, representing a certain class or social group (including the country and national groups), which in turn guides the actions of this class or group.

According to this definition, it can be said that ideology is a kind of ideological concept, but it is not a general ideological concept.

It has three characteristics:

The first is group nature, that is, it is not the ideological concepts of individual people, but the ideological concepts that have been accepted by a certain group (class or social group), representing The interests of this group and guide its actions;

The second is systematicity, that is, it is not fragmented ideas and concepts, but a system;

The third is historicality, that is It is formed on a certain socio-economic basis.

The following are described by many philosophers

Ideology

Louis Althusser

Ideology is A system of ideas and representations that governs the psyche of a person or a social group.

Ideology is the representation of the imaginary relationship between an individual and his or her real living state.

To illustrate my central thesis about the structure and function of ideology, I will first present two themes, one negative and the other positive. The first theme concerns the objects "represented" in ideological imaginary forms; the second theme concerns the materiality of ideology.

Theme 1: Ideology reproduces the imaginary relationship between individuals and their true state of existence.

… When we admit that ideology does not correspond to reality, that is, when we admit that ideology constitutes an illusion, we admit that ideology constitutes an illusion of reality, and they only need to be "Explanation" is the discovery of the reality of the world (ideology = illusion/suggestion) hidden behind the imaginary representation of that world.

Theme 2: Ideology has a material existence.

I have already touched upon this point when speaking of those "ideas" or "representations" that appear to shape ideologies but do not have an conceptual or spiritual existence, but rather have a material existence. theme. I even proposed that the conceptual or spiritual existence of "idea" only appears in the ideology of "idea", or in a certain ideology of ideology. Here I would add that it only appears in what seems to be the emergence of science. It is in the ideology in which this concept is grounded, that is, in the "ideas" that scientific practitioners present to themselves (true or false) in their spontaneous ideologies.

Terry Eagleton

Ideology refers specifically to the way in which power struggles unfold at the level of signification; although such signification is implicated in various hegemonic processes , but not at a level of dominance that maintains dominance in every situation.

Ideology is often experienced as a process of naturalization and universalization. By setting up a complex set of discursive means, ideology presents values ??that are in fact partisan, polemical, and of a specific historical stage as true for any time and place, and therefore as natural and inevitable. and immutable.

In short, ideology is a discourse issue, a practical communication issue between subjects in a historical situation, not just a language issue (the propositional issue we are talking about). Nor is ideology simply a matter of biased, biased, and partisan discourse, although there is no human discourse that is not.

Ideology refers to the largely concealed structure of values ??that pervades and is based on our actual statements. I am talking about the way we speak and believe within them, and how they relate to the way we live. The power structure of society is related to power relations...that is, the patterns of emotions, evaluations, perceptions and beliefs, which have some relationship with the maintenance of social power.

Clifford Geertz

As far as studying the social determinants of ideology, there are two main approaches: interest theory and tension theory. For the former, ideology is a mask or a weapon; for the latter, ideology is a disease and a prescription. According to the interest theory, ideological claims must be examined in the context of a broad struggle for superiority; according to the tension theory, they must be examined in the context of long efforts to correct social and psychological imbalances. In the former context, people are chasing power, in the latter context, people are fleeing from anxiety.

Despite other differences, the so-called cognitive and expressive symbols or symbol systems have at least one thing in common: they are both external resources of information, on which human life depends. Such resources shape them so that they are transpersonal mechanisms for perceiving, understanding, judging, and operating in the world. The patterns of culture - religious, philosophical, aesthetic, scientific, and ideological - are "programs"; they provide templates or blueprints for the organization of social and psychological processes, just as genetic mechanisms provide organisms The organization of the process provides such a template... Man, an animal that makes tools, laughs and lies, is also an unfinished animal, or to be more precise, a self-completed animal. Man is the subject of his self-realization, and he creates the special ability to define himself out of the general ability to construct symbolic patterns. In other words, returning to our topic, it is through the construction of ideology and the construction of schema images of social order that people make themselves a political animal for good or ill.

As cultural systems, the difference between science and ideology should be found in the different types of semiotic strategies of the overall situations they respectively represent. Science names the structure of situations in such a way that the attitudes toward them contained therein are disinterested, in a form that is restrained, concise, and absolutely analytical, by avoiding the most effective statements of moral sentiments. By means of semantics, science seeks maximum clarity of thought. Ideology names the structure of situations in such a way that the attitude toward those situations contained within it is a commitment. Its style is colorful, vivid and deliberately suggestive: expressing moral sentiments through semantic means that science eschews, it seeks to evoke people's actions...Science is the diagnostic and critical level of culture, and consciousness Form is the defensible and argumentative level of culture, which refers to "that part of culture that actively cares about the establishment and defense of beliefs and value patterns.

Fredric Jameson

From this higher perspective, we can see that the first ideological model, which is essentially epistemological, cannot give us much help, because it is not a certain ideological model that plays a decisive role now. The question of whether an ideological system is truth or falsehood is rather a question of its function, role and effectiveness in the class struggle. It is now believed that the tasks of the ideology of the ruling class are legitimation and hegemony (these two words come from respectively. Habermas and Gramsci), in other words, no ruling class can always rely on violence to maintain its rule, although violence is completely necessary in turbulent moments of social crisis. On the contrary, the ruling class must rely on people. This form of approval is at least a certain form of passive acceptance. Therefore, the basic function of the huge ruling class ideology is to convince people that social life should be like this, that change is a waste of effort, that social relations have always been like this, etc. At the same time, it is conceivable that the function of a countervailing ideology - such as Marxism itself, as the ideology of the proletariat, rather than as a "science" about the state of society - is to challenge the hegemonic Ideology poses a challenge, debunks, weakens, and disbelieves the ideology, and one must develop its own counter-ideology as part of the broader struggle to seize power.

Ernesto Laclau

Ideology does not consist of a misrecognition of the nature of affirmation; rather, on the contrary, ideology consists of a failure to recognize that What is constituted is the failure to recognize the indeterminate character of any possibility, and the failure to recognize the impossibility of any eventual bridging.

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Emmanuel Levinas

The concept of ideology was originally a Hegelian concept and was later used in Marxism A critique of bourgeois humanism, a concept that owes much of its compelling power to Nietzsche and Freud. Its novelty lies in the fact that rational phenomena may be obscure and more difficult to grasp than irrational phenomena. Its mystifying power can be so subtle that the art of logic is not enough to break the mystery. Mystification stems from an unconscious intention to mystify the mysterious.

Like reason in Kant’s transcendental dialectic, ideology may be a necessary source of illusion. This may be a recent view. If one believes Althusser, ideology always expresses the way in which consciousness experiences its dependence on the objective and material conditions that determine it, that is, on The dependence of scientific reason on the conditions to be grasped in its objectivity. However, an inevitable doubt is whether this also tells us something strange about the consciousness that is related to the order controlled by science. To be precise, it is related to what science belongs to, that is, the subject. Fracture, the great gap and "game" between science and existence.

Peter Bürger

It should be noted that in this model, ideology cannot simply be understood as a copy of social reality, that is, a copy of social reality , but should be regarded as a product of social reality. Ideology is the result of an activity that reacts to experienced reality as an insufficiency ("real reality", that is, the possibility of man unfolding in reality is suppressed, so that man is Forced into "fantasy realizing" himself in the religious realm). Ideologies are not simply reflections of certain social conditions; they are parts of the social reality as a whole: "Elements of ideology do not simply mask economic interests, they are not just slogans and slogans: they are elements of the real struggles being fought. "

Raymond Williams

"Ideology" is an indispensable term in sociological analysis, but the difficulty with this term lies above all. : Either it is used to describe: a) the systematic or conscious beliefs of a class or other social group, as in the usual use of the word "ideological" to mean some general principle or theoretical proposition, or generally less palatable The statement refers to some dogma. Either used to describe: b) the unique world view or universal concept of a class or social group, which includes some systematic and conscious beliefs, as well as less conscious and systematically elaborated attitudes, habits and emotions, and even some Unconscious assumptions, intentions and commitments.

Judith Williamson

Ideology is a meaning which is necessarily produced by the conditions of society and helps to perpetuate these social conditions. We feel a need to belong, to be in a certain social "class," although this need is difficult to detect. In fact this need may be given imaginatively. All of us truly need a social existence, a homogeneous culture. Mass media provides this need to some extent, and it can (potentially) fulfill an affirmative function in our lives.

Slavoj Zizek

As a belief, a set of ideas, beliefs, concepts, etc., the inner concept of ideology is used to convince us of its "truth" , but actually serves some implicit specific power interests.

The ideological criticism mode corresponding to this concept is the symptomatic reading mode: the purpose of this criticism is to reveal the implicit bias of official texts through cracks, gaps and clerical errors - to expose market exchanges with "equality and freedom" Equality and freedom among partners, of course, this kind of market confers privileges on the owners of the means of production.

Ideology is no longer seen as a mechanism that guarantees the homogeneity of social reproduction and as "social cohesion"; it becomes a Wittgensteinian process of ambiguous correlation and heterogeneity The scope of a "family" is strictly local. Along these lines, so-called ideological thematic critiques of domination strive to show that an ideology either exerts a decisive influence that is not limited to a certain social class, or to expose the marginalized role of ideology in social reproduction.